A fascinating engineer comes to my house. He does not manage to fix my internet, but he talks to me of wise things.
It all starts when I ask him where his accent comes from. ‘It’s a personal question,’ I say. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
He looks rather delighted. His accent, it turns out, is from the island of Rhodes. I don’t think I’ve ever in my wide life met someone from Rhodes.
He says that he got to a time in his life when he realised he needed to be a different person. ‘I needed to learn to be humble,’ he said. ‘So I went to Africa.’
He lived there - he did not say precisely where - for a year and then he came to Scotland and the moment he got here he knew he was home.
I thought, but did not say: me too.
And then he started talking about the appreciation of small things, what he called ‘details.’ He looked at me very seriously. ‘We have forgotten,’ he said, ‘how to be profound.’
I think he meant in both senses of the word - to go deep, and to have great knowledge and insight.
‘We are too busy,’ he said, mournfully.
He said some other things I wanted to write down.
‘You can’t chase ghosts,’ he said, at one point.
And there was something else - about worrying about the future or looking back into the past - which I can’t quite capture precisely.
He’s worried about the young people not laughing enough. He says that he loves the Scots for their sense of humour. ‘The old people will come out of the house and they will at once crack a joke,’ he said. ‘The young people, not so much.’
We wondered whether it was social media. (I start to think everything is social media.) He thinks perhaps it is because everyone is comparing themselves to everyone else. ‘Even when they go on holiday to the Antarctic.’
I could have listened to him all day. The accent of Rhodes is a beautiful thing. And I think he is right. We - the moderns, in the industrial, corporate age - have forgotten how to be profound. I love the profound. The red mare trained me in it. I must not forget. But at the same time, I must not forget how to laugh, either.