Of all the myths, none is more firmly anchored in the masculine hearts than that of the ‘feminine’ mystery, which allows for an easy explanation of all that appears inexplicable: the man ‘who does not understand’ a woman is happy to substitute an objective resistance for a subjective deficiency of the mind. So, instead of admitting his ignorance, he perceives the presence of a mystery outside himself: an alibi indeed that flatters laziness and vanity at once. In Thinks… David Lodge sets up a story that is ingeniously suited to his subjects: the central male character, director of a prestigious centre for cognitive science and an expert on artificial intelligence and human consciousness, Ralph Messenger is conducting an experiment to determine the nature of thought so he talks into a tape recorder freely and later transcribes the stream-of-consciousness ramblings. A recently widowed novelist just past 40 and an inveterate daily journal writer, Helen Reed, the central female character, turns up at Gloucester to teach a fiction-writing workshop. Since to men’s eyes, the opacity of the self-knowing self, of the pour soi, is denser in the other who is feminine and since men are unable to penetrate her special experience through any working of sympathy, Ralph Messenger suggests Helen Reed to swap journals (audio, written) so as to look into the mechanisms of the stream of consciousness and investigate how each of them described (separately) the same events experienced together.