The Diagram Did Not Help My Case

June fifth. There is a paperback currently living in my bag that I picked up on a whim three weeks ago, one of those popular nonfiction books that promises to answer a question you didn't know you were carrying around, except this one is about classification. Categories. Why we draw lines between things and where the lines actually fall. I read it in two sittings, which is the thing I do when a book has managed to convince me that an extremely ordinary concept is actually a philosophical abyss. By page ninety I had spent forty-five minutes thinking about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. I am telling you this without shame.

I made the mistake of mentioning this to Simone at work. Not even the hot dog part specifically, just that I had gone somewhere genuinely weird for several hours because of a book about categories. She asked which category. I said the sandwich one, as an example. She said, and I am quoting directly: 'I have a diagram for that.' A physical diagram. In a book she had apparently read six months ago and retained. She went to her bag and came back and put a page in front of me with a Venn situation on it, and I looked at it for a long time, and then I put my hands over my face.

Elena 0, Simone's diagram 1

The thing is, we were not even disagreeing. The diagram was basically proving my point. But somehow she had the diagram and I had only the unstructured conviction, and the person with the diagram always wins on some fundamental level that has nothing to do with the argument. Simone knows this. She was grinning in that way she does when she has already named the thing before you have finished saying it. The tab does not need to close when you were already looking at the answer on someone else's screen.

I have been back to the book twice since then. Gerald has a new leaf, the empty box is still folded flat on the kitchen shelf, and I have not registered for anything. But the category question is not done with me. I think that might be the point of a book like that, not to answer the thing but to get you comfortable sitting inside the not-knowing. Which is either very wise or a good reason to buy a diagram.