What are you thinking about?" she asked him.
"Oh, my father again. When he was in the room, we all watched what we said. You wouldn't have liked him. He didn't care what people talked about as long as they spoke to the point. And a subject had to be completed before a new one was begun. Thoughts had to be ordered, like boxcars on a track. You could not, when describing a summer in Paris, begin to speak about Istanbul."
"What if you did?"
"He had very prominent knuckles and they would turn white. A change in subject until =he= thought it had terminated, offended some inner sense of progression. It enraged him. In a similar way, if you were a chemist you could not speak of atonality. You might say you liked it. But no judgments.
- Paula Fox
Desperate Characters