Many years ago, when I was still an undergraduate, I traveled from eastern Iowa to the North of England to study English literature at the University of Leeds, a so-called “redbrick” university in West Yorkshire. There I lived for a year in a village on the outskirts of that soot-laden city in a hall of residence built in 1865 from Yorkshire gritstone. Most of my fellow residents were English, but others hailed from such faraway countries as Ghana, South Africa, Iceland, and Rhodesia.
Sometimes in the evenings I would walk down the hall to have a chat with my friend Asmundur (“Asi”) Jonsson, a husky, deep-voiced, older student from Keflavik. Asi smoked an ornate Meerschaum pipe. Sometimes, after I’d offered up a fresh opinion—or, no less likely, a callow misperception—he would sit back in his chair and patiently puff on his pipe as he formulated his response. “I should have thought,” he would finally say, and proceed to address whatever I’d said. More than once, his views differed from mine. I have long since forgotten our opinions, but I recall his opening phrase as vividly as I do the sweet fragrance of his tobacco. I had never heard it before and have rarely heard it since.
“I should have thought” is a verbal phrase cast in what grammarians call the conditional past tense. It places the action, in this case having a thought, in a time prior to the present, before a subsequent event has occurred. In this instance, the subsequent event is the voicing of a different or contrary opinion. For example, were Geoffrey to observe that “I’ve heard that it’s better to brush your teeth first, then floss afterward,” Nigel might reply, “I should have thought it was the other way around.” As this innocuous exchange illustrates, “I should have thought” provides a vehicle for polite disagreement. But even when engaged in more charged conversations, especially those concerning politics and religion, this now rare usage can serve to open the conversational space, establish an appropriate distance between conversationalists, and set a distinctive tone.
In contemporary American life, we have grown accustomed to living in cramped conversational spaces, where there is often little room for a variety of perspectives or a divergence of views. If one participant says something the other finds erroneous, ill-informed, or otherwise objectionable, the conversation may soon be abruptly over. Or worse, it might escalate into an angry confrontation.
By contrast, “I should have thought” expands the conversational arena to accommodate multiple, differing, and opposing views. And it opens the possibility of a “both/and” rather than a “right/wrong” or “either/or” resolution. Even views that stood in polar opposition at the beginning of the conversation may, by its end, prove compatible and even complementary.
By the same token, “I should have thought” widens the emotional distance between the participants in a conversation. It establishes an appropriate space between them. As the Zen teacher Norman Fischer has observed, in any relationship between two people, two components are ever present: their connection and their essential solitude. The two participants may be intimately connected by such bonds as family, friendship, country, or affiliation. At the same time, each has a private inner life that the other has no way of knowing. In the Japanese martial arts, an appropriate combative distance (known as ma-ai) is strictly maintained. Analogously, an appropriate distance in conversation honors both the speakers’ interconnection and their respective solitudes. And, as Fischer puts it, it also creates “[a] space charged with openness, silence, and mystery.”
And that is not all. In its very formality, “I should have thought” forges a link between contemporary usage, which tends to be casual and all too often careless, and the long history of the English language. Asi’s first language was Icelandic. He learned English in a school, where the old rule regarding “should” rather than “would” was still taught and enforced. According to that rule, “should” must be used when speaking in the first person. However archaic, Asi’s locution conjured a linguistic universe in which the observance of such fine distinctions imparted precision to ordinary speech. By extension, it also heightened the beauty and dignity of a conversation.
Today, no one I know would say “I should have thought,” except perhaps ironically or in a role-playing context. The phrase would come across as a pretentious affectation. But might there not be other ways by which the space, distance, and tone once created by that turn of phrase could be re-imagined, if only as a welcome alternative to the rude interruptions and abrupt dismissals, the in-your-face confrontations, and the unnecessary misunderstandings that afflict contemporary American discourse? I should have thought so.
Last month, an Alfred State College student, who was working on a project concerning “spiritual life in the Alfred area,” contacted me to request an interview. Although I am hardly an authority on such matters, I agreed to speak with him. His questions, submitted in advance, struck me as serious and provocative. Foremost among them was the question, “Why do you think it is important for students to explore spirituality while in college?”
“We rarely contact this simple moment,” wrote the Zen-trained teacher Toni Packer (1927-2013). “So used to constant input and excitement, we lack fine-tuning into all the subtleties of this instant, the ability to register a quiet aliveness without the stirring of expectation.”
One Time, One Meeting 