sometimes you decline a cup of coffee and get a short questionnaire.
is it the caffeine? the taste? is it a medical thing? there's decaf! have you tried it with oat milk? several possible explanations are available and one must be selected before you can have tea.
usually people are trying to be helpful. they have coffee and would like you to enjoy some. but there's a point where "why?" starts to mean "give me a reason i'll accept".
i think we do this to each other a lot.
someone wants to leave early. someone needs a quieter place to sit. someone doesn't want to talk about their family. the request seems negotiable until they produce enough supporting material. a diagnosis perhaps. something sufficiently unpleasant that everyone agrees to stop asking.
"i'd rather not" has a surprisingly high burden of proof.
édouard glissant (the martinician writer) argued for
le droit à l'opacitéthe right to opacity. he was writing about colonial power and its demand to understand people through its own categories: to classify them, explain them, make them legible on its terms. his argument leaves room for relationships between people who cannot fully account for one another. understanding can remain incomplete without making coexistence impossible.
1how much do i actually need to understand before i can take someone seriously?
if someone says a room is too loud, i can help find somewhere quieter. i don't need to experience noise the way they do. i don't need their medical history. we can just move somewhere else.
sometimes an explanation is difficult because the subject is private. sometimes the person hasn't figured it out themselves. sometimes they've explained it six times today and just want to eat their sandwich.
requiring a convincing explanation makes being articulate a condition of being accommodated. you can have the need, but you also have to be good at presenting it.
there are obligations here of course. if we make plans and i don't show up, you have a reasonable interest in what happened. my mysterious inner life has left you standing outside a restaurant. how our actions affect other people matters.
but a lot of these little interrogations happen when accepting the answer costs nearly nothing.