אֱמוּנָה

When people are incapable of listening, when they are stone(d) deaf or blind to each other, the resulting condition may seem comic if the observer has the requisite distance, which observers in these circumstances seldom do. Comic dramatic writing depends, at least in part, on misunderstandings, mishearings, misinterpretations, misplacement, comic self-centeredness, and a daily diet of broken-off conversations. All this can be funny to watch and to listen to. But then, very quickly, it modulates into the peculiar hellish isolation of the person who faces a blank wall, in the form of a non listener, or a compulsive interruptor.

There should be a wise discussion somewhere of the non discourse of modern narcissism. We all know the type who generates it: after all, who has not heard hours and hours and hours of self-conversation by virtuosi of the boarded-up self? Such people are almost incapable of conversation except when priming their own pumps. In perpetual therapy administered to themselves by themselves, they must be roused to conversation by a question about their biographies, like opera singers waiting for their cue. Once incited, their arias have commenced and cannot be stopped until the curtain falls. There are no questions directed at the listener, no inquiries about subjects of common interest, no curiosity about larger subjects, no real diversions, no points of interest out there. Certainly there can be no conversational back-and-forth. How could there be? There are only statements, followed by other statements, leading eventually to over statements, when the listener eventually tires, flags, sighs, grows tried of saying, “You’re right,” and turns away.