Bertrand Russell once commented that if we had telepathy and could accurately read off each other's thoughts it would initially be a disaster. People would see each other's unutterable little truths, which would poison the most comfortable of relationships. We wouldn't be able to bear each other. But over time, as these painful insights started to become familiar, we would begin to find a way to live with them and with each other again. We would acclimatize.

The awkward truth in his insight is that there is undeniably a gap between the barely coherent and somewhat indigestible stream of our consciousness and the way we frame ourselves to each other. If we could interpret anything, the biggest shock we might get is how little we figure in each other's thoughts at all, as we saw Isabel Dalhousie discovered, at the start of Chapter 9. But her conscious thinking is the tip of an iceberg of mental activity, most of which is never available for introspection (if she was an actual person). As we have seen, what is wrong with Russell's picture is the thought that these mental states could be read off in the first place: back to our buried treasure again. All understanding involves translation, from one mind to another. And this can't happen without loss, because the other mind isn't fully available, even to its owner. Russell's anecdote presupposes that those thoughts are legible in the first place.