Mark Haddon: The curious Incident or the Dog in the Night-time
181
I see everything.
That is why I don’t like new places. If I am in a place I know, like home, or school, or the bus, or the shop, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. For example, one week, the Shakespeare’s Globe poster had fallen down in the classroom at school and you could tell because it had been put back slightly to the right and there were three little circles of Blu-Tack stain on the wall down the left-hand side of the poster. And the next day someone had graffitied CROW APTOK to lamppost 437 in our street which is the one outside number 35.
But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing which is the same word for bumping off something and carrying on in almost the same direction, e.g. when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball. And the infomation in their head is really simple. For example, if they are in the countryside, it might be
And then they would stop noticing anything because they would be thinking something elxe like, ‘Oh, it is very beautiful here,’ or, ‘I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on,’ or, ‘I wonder if Julie has given birth yet.’12
But if I am standing in a field in the countryside I notice everything. For example, I remeber standing in a field on Wednesday 15th June 1994 because Father and Mother and I were driving to Dover to get a ferry to France and we did what Father called Taking the scenic route which means going by little roads and stopping for lunch in a pub garden, and I had to stop to go for a wee, and I went into a field with cows in and after I’d had a wee I stopped and looked at the field and I noticed these things
[...picture of a cow...]
And I realise that I told a lie in Chapter 13 because I said, ‘I cannot tell jokes’, because I do know 3 jokes that I can tell and I understand and one of them is about a cow, and Siobhan said I didn’t have to go back and change what I wrote in Chapter 13 because it doesn’t matter because it is not a lie, just a clarification.
And this is the joke.
There are three men on a train. One of them is an economist and one of them is a logician and one of them is a mathematician. And they have just crossed the border into Scotland (I don’t know why they are going to Scotland) and they see a brown cow standing in a field from the window of the train (and the cow is standing parallel to the train).
And the economist says, ‘Look, the cows in Scotland are brown.’
And the logicion says, ‘No. There are cows in Scotland of which one, at least, is brown.’
And the mathematicion says, ‘No. There is at least one cow in Scotland, of which one side appears to be brown.’
And it is funny because economists are not real scientists, and because logicians think more clearly, but mathematicians are best.
And when I am in a new place, because I see everything, it is like when a computer is doing too many things at the same time and the central processor unit is blocked up and there isn’t any space left to think about other things. And when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is even harder because people are not like cows and flowers and grass and they can talk to you and do things that you don’t expect, so you have to notice everything that is in the place, and also you have to notice things that might happen as well. And sometimes, when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remeber what I am doing and where I am meant to be going.
And that is why I am good at chess and maths and logic, because most people are almost blind and they don’t see most things and there is lots of spare capacity in their heads and it is filled with things which aren’t connected and are silly, like, ‘I’m worried that I might have left the gas cooker on.’
12 This is really true because I asked Siobhan what people thought about when they looked at htings, and this is what she said.
