Tact is after all a kind of mind-reading.

I have come to realize that there are two principal things we should look for and focus on: comfort and discomfort. [...] Learning to read comfort and discomfort cues (behaviors) in others accurately will help you decipher what their bodies and minds are truly saying.

How would I describe what I do? I suppose a mixture of psychological reading and showmanship and a special form of poncing-about which kind of comes together to form the effect of thought reading and psychological influence but non, non-psychic... not ‘non-non-psychic’, non-psychic.

Ah! what caution must men use With those who look not at the deed alone, But spy into the thoughts with subtle skill!

Now the situation is different, I admit: I have a wristwatch, I compare the angle of its hands with the angle of all the hands I see; I have an engagement book where the hours of my business appointments are marked down; I have a chequebook on whose stubs I add and subtract numbers. At Penn Station I get off the train, I take the subway, I stand and grasp the strap with one hand to keep my balance while I hold the newspaper up in the other, folded so I can glance over the figures of the stock market quotations: I play the game, in other words, the game of pretending there's an order in the dust, a regularity in the system, or an interpretation of different systems, incongruous but still measurable, so that every graininess of disorder coincides with the faceting of an order which promptly crumbles.

A game looks like a set of operations, but after the payoff it becomes apparent that these operations were really maneuvers; not honest requests but moves in the game.

We can learn to read symptoms not only as problems to be overcome but as messages to be heeded. (p268)

"Turing's 'Machines'. These machines are humans who calculate. And one might express what he says also in the form of games. And the interesting games would be such as brought one via certain rules to nonsensical instructions. I am thinking of games like the "racing game". One has received the order "Go on in the same way" when this makes no sense, say because one has got into a circle. For any order makes sense only in certain positions."

There is a subconscious, emotional level that informs playing, and since I’m the kind of person who carries his baggage around internally, nothing has ever helped me tap into my feelings more.