Interior Monologue

I heard the phrase recently. Can’t recall exactly when. It was uttered on a radio program, but I can’t recall what the program was about. Probably literature, since interior monologue is a narrative ploy. The mention sent me off on a sidetrack. An interior monologue, in fact, in which I began to compose a note about how interior monologue has been part of my waking life for as long as I can remember.

Most of the time, it’s me talking to myself, thinking out loud internally, so to speak, testing ways of saying things so they make sense. I talk out loud like this too, some of the time, which causes problems when people assume I’m stating some kind of position or point of view. I’m not. I sometimes wonder whether so-called mansplaining is just some other guy doing the same thing.

I also like to restate what seem to me plausible insights in order to lead into the test of whatever comes up as the next step. I want what I think I’ve found to be plausible to lead to the next idea. Anyhow, that’s how many of my ideas happen: I go over what I think I know or understand, and something new shows up. So I turn it this way and that, I say it several different ways to myself, to see which way of saying it makes sense. Sometimes this forces me to rethink what I think I know or understand.

Sometimes a new idea just appears. Well, they’re rarely new ideas, they’re usually new ways (to me) of saying old ideas. I try them out, vary them, until I find a formulation that seems to express that idea clearly and pithily. I do this with poorly-recalled memes I’ve found elsewhere too, like this one (I can’t recall the original):

We used to think the cure for stupidity was more facts. Then we got the internet.