There is nothing like eavesdropping to show you that the world outside your head is different from the world inside your head.

The remark points to the gap between private consciousness and public reality. Inside our heads, we narrate motives, rehearse conversations, and assume others see the world as we do; overhearing real speech punctures that solipsism. Eavesdropping—morally dubious though it may be—becomes a metaphor for any unfiltered encounter with other people’s lives: their idioms, priorities, and emotional weather. Wilder’s work often stresses the hidden interiority of ordinary lives and the limits of what we can know about one another; this line underscores how easily we mistake our inner story for the world itself, and how bracing it is to be reminded that other minds run on different tracks.