6:19am January 8, 2012

“

The mother put a stop to the patting, told her daughter that was enough. Then she turned to me with another smile, and commented, “First she’s going to run away from it screaming, and then she won’t stop petting it.”

That was what the sounds said. But in the saying of them, and in the tone of the saying, and in the look at me during the saying, what she meant was this: “She is strange, and she does things that do not make sense. You and I know better. We are like each other in being different from her.”

Then we went our separate ways: two people from the same world who had met briefly over a common focus; and a third person, an outsider, so tuned out that she didn’t even realize how different she was.

”

Jim Sinclair, Alien Contact

This took me forever to notice so I’m going to point it out to people who don’t get double meanings easily:

The last paragraph can be taken in two ways.

The way the mother sees it: Jim and the mother meeting over a common focus, the daughter too tuned out to see how different she was.

Or the way it actually worked: Jim and the daughter meeting over a common focus, the mother too tuned out to notice how different she was.

I thought the double meaning was brilliant. And anyway, go read the article: It’s great, and I have a printout of it in my collection of articles showing the way (some) autistic people can instantly communicate on meeting, in ways that are often invisible to nonautistic people. (Also may be invisible to incompatible autistic people.)

ETA: fixed link

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