and we come to rely on that ability because there are lots of
hidden fists out there, lots of situations where careful attention
to the details of a very thin slice, even for no more than a
second or two, can tell us an awful lot.
It is striking, for instance, how many different professions
and disciplines have a word to describe the particular gift of
reading deeply into the narrowest slivers of experience. In
basketball, the player who can take in and comprehend all that
is happening around him or her is said to have “court sense.” In
the military, brilliant generals are said to possess “coup d’oeil”
— which, translated from the French, means “power of the
glance”: the ability to immediately see and make sense of the
battlefield. Napoleon had coup d’oeil. So did Patton. The
ornithologist David Sibley says that in Cape May, New Jersey,
he once spotted a bird in flight from two hundred yards away
and knew, instantly, that it was a ruff, a rare sandpiper. He had
never seen a ruff in flight before; nor was the moment long
enough for him to make a careful identification. But he was
able to capture what bird-watchers call the bird’s “giss” — its
essence — and that was enough.
“Most of bird identification is based on a sort of subjective
impression — the way a bird moves and little instantaneous