Response to Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation

There is nothing more comforting than hearing a really great narrator tell a great story. I love to read and get lost in various books, but I believe that by simply reading the words on a page, we loose so much from an experience. I will admit that I am a visual learner. I have difficulty only hearing something and fully comprehending it. I need to read it as well. So while I love listening to a book on tape, I need the physical book there in front of me. However, the most magical experience is hearing an author speak the words he or she spent countless hours pouring his or her soul into. My freshman year I had the opportunity to go see Hillary Clinton on her book tour for Hard Choices. I am not claiming, on any level, that Hillary Clinton is a literary genius, but by hearing the inflections in her voice as she read and where she paused and chose not pause, the book had a new life to it. Novels, essays, and poems, when written well, evoke strong emotions in readers, but there is a reason that most people are more likely to cry while listening to these pieces of writing rather than just reading them. The human voice creates emotion. Everyday when I come home from school and tell my mother that my day was just “fine,” she can tell by how I say that one simple word how my day actually was.

We are connected by words. As Le Guin puts it, “The living response has enabled that voice to speak. Teller and listener, each fulfills the other’s expectations. The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude,” (Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation). A conversation is very much like a partnered dance. You have to stand on your own two feet and control your own body, but the two partners must also be one single mechanism moving together in sync. This weekend I went to the Annapolis Film Festival and watched the screening of Alive and Kicking, a documentary about swing dancing. One of the dancers explained that you cannot choreograph a swing dance because you never know what song you will be dancing to, whether it be at a competition or just the local hub for dancing. Instead, the leader and the follower must work together. The leader always thinking ahead about the next move and how to get his or her partner there, and the follower always reacting to the leader. A conversation is basically the same. The speaker is the leader and the listener is the follower. However, in a conversation, the roles frequently are being reversed.  Sadly in today’s world it seems as though conversations are becoming more like monologues. In a highly charged political climate, many simply state their own views and opinions and rarely listen to what others actually have to say. This immediately severs that bond of speaker and listener and effectively ends the possibility of understaning and compromise. I think its time we all stop only listening to what we want to hear and engage once again in dancing with words with all types of people. It may not be comfortable, but change never is.