Perhaps, she reflected, they only "pretended" to understand.
However, he loves reading books while I work, sitting in on meetings and taking notes, or pretending to understand (and sometimes actually understanding!) what the adults are discussing.
John sometimes pretended not to understand his in-laws when understanding them would inconvenience him.
Trying to pretend we understand, not to mention turning that understanding into a thinkpiece, risks offending those who loved those who were lost.
Why do we pretend that understanding business means understanding everything else, too?
How can you pretend to lead others without understanding them first, and, by implication, yourself?
If our lives include the kind of absurd irruption that confronts Montgomery, and if, like her, we are clear-sighted, we cannot pretend that medical understanding isn't severely limited that its surest source of knowledge, abstract and general, misfits its domain of practice: individual, concrete, particular, anomalous people.
But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.
The hardest thing was understanding the struggle, the depth of her depression, pretending everything was OK while being beaten the shit out of every day.
By age 18 months, we enter fictional worlds knowingly, understanding a banana is a banana and a pretend phone.
It is clear, however, that at the symptomatic level (S), therapeutic research cannot pretend to reach an understanding of the pathological mechanisms.
