Primary-Colored Blocks of Fact

I've been thinking lately about how friendships can fracture when my expectations collide with yours, or vice versa.  Often we don't even have the vocabulary for saying what the difference is.  Instead, we stew over (or I do) the seemingly un-crossable gulf between the actions of another and my own. 

A friend and I were talking about opinions this week, how we're less likely to express our opinions than we used to be.  Right after that, another person said something so wrong-headed that I picked it apart in my mind for a day or two.   I'm still as likely to rankled as ever, but I don't hold on to it as long.  I can't even remember now what it was about! 

Maria Popova, creator of Brainpickings, should win a major award for her site.  Not only does she bring a cosmos of brilliant writers together around a topic every week, but she herself is an amazing writer.  Here's how she begins the one for today:

To understand anything... is to restructure our existing knowledge, shifting and broadening our prior frames of reference to accommodate a new awareness. And yet we have a habit of confusing our knowledge — which is always limited and incomplete: a model of the cathedral of reality, built from primary-colored blocks of fact — with the actuality of things; we have a habit of mistaking the model for the thing itself, mistaking our partial awareness for a totality of understanding. Thoreau recognized this when he contemplated our blinding preconceptions and lamented that “we hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

She later quotes Aldous Huxley on the difference between knowledge and understanding:

"Knowledge is acquired when we succeed in fitting a new experience into the system of concepts based upon our old experiences. Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our existence."

and

"Understanding is not conceptual, and therefore cannot be passed on. It is an immediate experience, and immediate experience can only be talked about (very inadequately), never shared. Nobody can actually feel another’s pain or grief, another’s love or joy or hunger. And similarly nobody can experience another’s understanding of a given event or situation… We must always remember that knowledge of understanding is not the same thing as the understanding, which is the raw material of that knowledge. It is as different from understanding as the doctor’s prescription for penicillin is different from penicillin."