And The Moral of the Story Is

THE emi­nent Russ­ian physi­cist Andrei Linde once found him­self on a long flight seat­ed beside a busi­ness­man nose-deep in A Brief His­to­ry of Time.

With­out hav­ing been intro­duced and before the usu­al small talk, they struck up a con­ver­sa­tion about it.

“What do you think of it?” Linde asked.

“Fas­ci­nat­ing,” said the busi­ness­man. “I can’t put it down.”

“Oh, that’s inter­est­ing,” the sci­en­tist replied. “I found it quite heavy going in places and didn’t ful­ly under­stand some parts.”

At which point the busi­ness­man closed the book on his lap, leaned across with a com­pas­sion­ate smile, and said, “Let me explain.…”

Sto­ries like this keep me from say­ing every­thing I think…

source (the above excerpt is actu­al­ly a con­fla­tion of two sources, the first was from Sun­day On Scot­land, but I can’t find a link that works. Any­way, their open­ing sen­tence was much bet­ter than the sec­ond source I found so I kept it)