There is a well-known scene in Good Will Hunting where Sean, the therapist played by Robin Williams, tells Will Hunting something that arrives with the weight of a verdict.

They are sitting on a bench in the Public Garden, late afternoon. Will is young, hostile, and brilliant. He’s the kind of working-class kid who has read every book in the library and come to resent about half of them. He has just spent a session dismantling Sean — taking apart a painting in his office, sniffing out the unfinished grief in Sean's marriage, and doing it all with the easy cruelty of someone who has never had to be wrong out loud.

Sean has come back for round two. Instead of meeting Will in the office, he asks him to take a walk. They sit on the bench. And Sean, in a voice that is not angry — that is somehow gentler for not being angry — leaves Will with a remarkable truth. My paraphrase:

If I asked you about art, you could tell me everything. Michelangelo — his life's work, his political aspirations, him and the Pope, the whole works. But you have never stood inside the Sistine Chapel. You don't know what it smells like in there. You could throw Shakespeare at me on the subject of war, but you have never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him take his last breath. You could give me a syllabus of every woman you've ever known, but you cannot tell me what it feels like to wake up next to one and be, for that single quiet moment, truly happy.

He is not trying to win the argument. He is not, really, even arguing. He is trying, with some patience, to point at the gap between two things that look nearly identical from across the room and turn out, on closer inspection, to be different in kind.

One is an opinion. The other is something else entirely: a lived understanding. One you can produce on demand. The other arrives slowly, through a wealth of accumulated exposure that nothing in the world can shortcut.

I should say up front that I am not a staunch opinion-holder by nature. In a room full of people debating something — politics, real estate, whether the designated hitter has ruined the soul of baseball — I tend to be the one watching, mildly entertained, happy to let two people who are far better rhetorically duke it out while I sit back with whatever's in my glass. It is its own kind of cowardice, probably. The ideas in my head just typically don’t find the right words in time. But this propensity, or lack thereof, has had the side effect of making me notice, with some clarity, the small handful of things I do hold opinions about. And it has made me notice, with even more clarity, how few of those opinions are actually mine.

Some are clearly bestowed. For one, I have opinions about ketchup. If it isn’t Heinz, it isn’t ketchup. It’s a glorified tomato sauce. I have left restaurants over less.

This is a position held without much examination, offered unsolicited, stated with the conviction of a man who has clearly given the matter almost no thought at all. It comes up more than you'd think, if you're the sort of person who holds positions on condiments. And apparently I am.

A few years back, my roommate decided to test me. He set a plate with two puddles of ketchup in front of me. One was Heinz and the other was an arrogant counterfeit called Hunt’s. He handed me a dish towel to use as a blindfold, and told me to find the Heinz. I accepted his challenge with the gravity of a man being asked to identify his own child in a lineup.

Of course, I knew immediately which was the Heinz. There was no doubt. I was certain right up until the moment I was wrong.

Not close-but-wrong. Confidently wrong. I picked the imposter, made my case, and waited to be congratulated. The opinion was intact. The taste, it turned out, was something I had been performing rather than possessing. I liked being a Heinz person the way some men like being a Ford person, or a Hemingway person, or the kind of guy who tells you, unprompted, that he doesn’t own a television, and waits for you to react.

I wasn't embarrassed about this for very long. It was a decision made under duress, on an empty stomach, in suboptimal lighting. It would not hold up in court.

But there is a difference between having an opinion and having taste, and the difference is not intelligence, or even exposure, exactly. It is something only time can give you. Slow, unremarkable, accumulated time, during which you encounter a thing repeatedly, without agenda, until your responses begin to organize themselves into something you didn't choose. That is what taste actually is. It is what your preferences become when nobody, even you, is watching them.

An opinion you can have immediately. You walk out of a movie and you have one. You finish a meal and you have one. You read the first chapter of a novel on a plane and you have one, and then you tell three people about it before you've read the second chapter. None of this is a moral failing — opinions are how we navigate the world, how we decide where to eat, how we make small talk with our in-laws. They are useful. They are often right. The trouble is when we mistake them for something they aren't.

Sean's point to Will is gentler than it sounds. He is not saying Will is wrong. He is saying Will is fast, and fast isn't the same as knowing, as having experienced, as having formed taste. Will can win any argument in under thirty seconds. He has read voraciously, remembered everything, and can deploy the whole library on command. But the opinion is built from other people's lived experience, not his own. He has never had his heart broken by a specific person in a specific kitchen on a specific Tuesday. He has read about heartbreak. He can tell you what it is. He cannot tell you what it does.

Taste is what happens when you have actually been through something enough times that it has revealed itself to you. It’s the laurels of experience. You don't always know why you respond the way you do. You just do, and you trust it, and over time the responses turn out to be consistent in a way that surprises even you. That consistency is taste. It is not a preference you chose. It is a preference that revealed itself.

I do think the world currently optimizes itself hard for the opinion. Rate this experience one to five stars. Review your recent stay. Hot take, cold take, here is my thread on the new film I saw last night and have already finished thinking about. Any news program, delivered with spin, seasoned and salted for us to consume and replicate.

None of this is wrong, exactly. I have rated my dentist. I have rated my plumber. I have, at the request of an automated email, rated the experience of returning a pair of shoes. It was fine.

But the mechanism rewards speed and confidence and quietly punishes the person who says I don't know yet, give me a year. The person who needs a year is giving himself a chance to define something real.

I want to be careful not to be pious about this. I have plenty of opinions, formed too quickly, stated too confidently, about things I have not earned the right to judge. I am not arguing for silence, or false humility, or the small and increasingly fashionable performance of withholding. That has its own kind of vanity. I am only saying that I have noticed, with some embarrassment, the difference between the moments when I am responding to something and the moments when I am producing an assessment of it. They feel different. The response is slower. It tends to be quieter. It does not always know how to explain itself.

Sean tells Will he can't tell him what it is like to wake up next to someone for forty years and suddenly they're gone. Not because Will is stupid. Because he’s a kid, and he hasn't done it. The opinion can be handed to you. The taste — or in Sean's case, the knowing — has to be accumulated yourself, at the pace life allows, without any shortcut.

I still buy Heinz. Always will. I'm not going to pretend the experiment changed my behavior at the grocery store. But I have changed, slightly, what I think the bottle is doing for me. It is not proof of taste. It is a preference I picked up somewhere along the way and have not bothered to test since. Which is fine. Most of what we believe about ourselves is held the same way.

The trick, I think, is simply knowing which is which.

John

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John Conrad