In the wells of silence

some nice old-fashioned words


Tell Me More On The Fine Art of Listening
By Brenda Ueland

I want to write about the great and powerful thing that listening is.
And how we forget it. And how we don't listen to our children, or
those we love. And least of all-which is so important too-to those we
do not love. But we should. Because listening is a magnetic and
strange thing, a creative force. Think how the friends that really
listen to us are the ones we move toward, and we want to sit in their
radius as though it did us good, like ultraviolet rays.

This is the reason: When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us
unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to
life. You know how if a person laughs at your jokes you become funnier
and funnier, and if he does not, every tiny little joke in you weakens
up and dies. Well, that is the principle of it. It makes people happy
and free when they are listened to. And if you are a listener, it is
the secret of having a good time in society (because everybody around
you becomes lively and interesting), of comforting people, of doing
them good.

Who are the people, for example, to whom you go for advice? Not to the
hard, practical ones who can tell you exactly what to do, but to the
listeners; that is, the kindest, least censorious, least bossy people
that you know. It is because by pouring out your problem to them, you
then know what to do about it yourself.

When we listen to people there is an alternating current, and this
recharges us so that we never get tired of each other. We are
constantly being re-created. Now there are brilliant people who cannot
listen much. They have no ingoing wires on their apparatus. They are
entertaining, but exhausting, too. I think it is because these
lecturers, these brilliant performers, by not giving us a chance to
talk, do not let us express our thoughts and expand; and it is this
little creative fountain inside us that begins to spring and cast up
new thoughts, and unexpected laughter and wisdom. That is why, when
someone has listened to you, you go home rested and lighthearted.

Now this little creative fountain is in us all. It is the spirit, or
the intelligence, or the imagination- whatever you want to call it. If
you are very tired, strained, have no solitude, run too many errands,
talk to too many people, drink too many cocktails, this little
fountain is muddied over and covered with a lot of debris. The result
is you stop living from the center, the creative fountain, and you
live from the periphery, from externals. That is, you go along on mere
willpower without imagination.

It is when people really listen to us, with quiet fascinated
attention, that the little fountain begins to work again, to
accelerate in the most surprising way.

I discovered all this about three years ago, and truly it made a
revolutionary change in my life. Before that, when I went to a party
I would think anxiously, "Now try hard. Be lively. Say bright things.
Talk. Don't let down." And when tired, I would have to drink a lot of
coffee to keep this up.

Now before going to a party I just tell myself to listen with
affection to anyone who talks to me, to be in their shoes when they
talk; to try to know them without my mind pressing against theirs, or
arguing, or changing the subject. No. My attitude is, "Tell me more.
This person is showing me his soul. It is a little dry and meager and
full of grinding talk just now, but presently he will begin to think,
not just automatically to talk. He will show his true self. Then he
will be wonderfully alive."

Sometimes, of course, I cannot listen as well as others. But when I
have this listening power, people crowd around and their heads keep
turning to me as though irresistibly pulled. It is not because people
are conceited and want to show off that they are drawn to me, the
listener. It is because by listening I have started up their creative
fountain. I do them good.

Now why does it do them good? I have a kind of mystical notion about
this. I think it is only by expressing all that is inside that purer
and purer streams come. It is so in writing. You are taught in school
to put down on paper only the bright things. Wrong. Pour out the dull
things on paper too-you can tear them up afterward-for only then do
the bright ones come. If you hold back the dull things, you are
certain to hold back what is clear and beautiful and true and lively.
So it is with people who have not been listened to in the right way-
with affection and a kind of jolly excitement. Their creative fountain
has been blocked. Only superficial talk comes out-what is prissy or
gushing or merely nervous. No one has called out of them, by wonderful
listening, what is true and alive.

I think women have this listening faculty more than men. It is not the
fault of men. They lose it because of their long habit of striving in
business, of self-assertion. And the more forceful men are, the less
they can listen as they grow older. And that is why women in general
are more fun than men, more restful and inspiring.

Now this non-listening of able men is the cause of one of the saddest
things in the world-the loneliness of fathers, of those quietly sad
men who move among their grown children like remote ghosts. When my
father was over 70, he was a fiery, humorous, admirable man, a
scholar, a man of great force. But he was deep in the loneliness of
old age and another generation. He was so fond of me. But he could not
hear me-not one word I said, really. I was just audience. I would walk
around the lake with him on a beautiful afternoon and he would talk to
me about Darwin and Huxley and Higher Criticism of the Bible.

"Yes, I see, I see," I kept saying and tried to keep my mind pinned to
it, but I was restive and bored. There was a feeling of helplessness
because he could not hear what I had to say about it. When I spoke I
found myself shouting, as one does to a foreigner, and in a kind of
despair that he could not hear me. After the walk I would feel that I
had worked off my duty and I was anxious to get him settled and
reading in his Morris chair, so that I could go out and have a
livelier time with other people. And he would sigh and look after me
absentmindedly with perplexed loneliness.

For years afterward, I have thought with real suffering about my
father's loneliness. Such a wonderful man, and reaching out to me and
wanting to know me! But he could not. He could not listen. But now I
think that if only I had known as much about listening then as I do
now, I could have bridged that chasm between us. To give an example:

Recently, a man I had not seen for 20 years wrote me: "I have a family
of mature children. So did your father. They never saw him. Not in the
days he was alive. Not in the days he was the deep and admirable man
we now both know he was. That is man's life. When next you see me,
you'll just know everything. Just your father all over again, trying
to reach through, back to the world of those he loves."

Well, when I saw this man again, what had happened to him after 20
years? He was an unusually forceful man and had made a great deal of
money. But he had lost his ability to listen. He talked rapidly and
told wonderful stories and it was just fascinating to hear them. But
when I spoke-restlessness, "Just hand me that, will you?...Where is my
pipe?" It was just a habit. He read countless books and he was eager
to take in ideas, but he just could not listen to people.

Well this is what I did. I was more patient-I did not resist his non-
listening talk as I did my father's. I listened and listened to him,
not once pressing against him, even in thought, with my own self-
assertion. I said to myself, "He has been under a driving pressure for
years. His family has grown to resist his talk. But now, by listening,
I will pull it all out of him. He must talk freely and on and on. When
he has been really listened to enough, he will grow tranquil. He will
begin to want to hear me."

And he did, after a few days. He began asking me questions. And
presently I was saying gently, "You see, it has become hard for you to
listen."

He stopped dead and stared at me. And it was because I had listened
with such complete, absorbed, uncritical sympathy, without one flaw of
boredom or impatience, that he now believed and trusted me, although
he did not know this.

"Now talk," he said. "Tell me about that. Tell me all about that."

Well, we walked back and forth across the lawn and I told him my ideas
about it.
"You love your children, but probably don't let them in. Unless you
listen, people are wizened in your presence; they become about a third
of themselves. Unless you listen, you can't know anybody. Oh, you will
know facts and what is in the newspapers and all of history, perhaps,
but you will not know one single person. You know, I have come to
think listening is love, that's what it really is."

Well, I don't think I would have written this article if my notions
had not had such an extraordinary effect on this man. For he says they
have changed his whole life. He wrote me that his children at once
came closer; he was astonished to see what they are; how original,
independent, courageous. His wife seemed really to care about him
again, and they were actually talking about all kinds of things and
making each other laugh.

For just as the tragedy of parents and children is not listening, so
it is of husbands and wives. If they disagree they begin to shout
louder and louder-if not actually, at least inwardly-hanging fiercely
and deafly onto their own ideas, instead of listening and becoming
quieter and quieter and more comprehending. But the most serious
result of not listening is that worst thing in the world, boredom; for
it is really the death of love. It seals people off from each other
more than any other thing. I think that is why married people quarrel.
It is to cut through the non-conduction and boredom. Because when
feelings are hurt, they really begin to listen. At last their talk is
a real exchange. But of course, they are injuring their marriage
forever.

Besides critical listening, there is another kind that is no good:
passive, censorious listening. Sometimes husbands can be this kind of
listener, a kind of ungenerous eavesdropper who mentally (or aloud)
keeps saying as you talk, "Bunk...Bunk...Hokum."

Now, how to listen? It is harder than you think. I don't believe in
critical listening, for that only puts a person in a straitjacket of
hesitancy. He begins to choose his words solemnly or primly. His
little inner fountain cannot spring. Critical listeners dry you up.
But creative listeners are those who want you to be recklessly
yourself, even at your very worst, even vituperative, bad-tempered.
They are laughing and just delighted with any manifestation of
yourself, bad or good. For true listeners know that if you are bad-
tempered it does not mean that you are always so. They don't love you
just when you are nice; they love all of you.

In order to learn to listen, here are some suggestions: Try to learn
tranquility, to live in the present a part of the time every day.
Sometimes say to yourself, "Now. What is happening now? This friend is
talking. I am quiet. There is endless time. I hear it, every word."
Then suddenly you begin to hear not only what people are saying, but
what they are trying to say, and you sense the whole truth about them.
And you sense existence, not piecemeal, not this object and that, but
as a translucent whole.

Then watch your self-assertiveness. And give it up. Try not to drink
too many cocktails to give up that nervous pressure that feels like
energy and wit but may be neither. And remember it is not enough just
to will to listen to people. One must really listen. Only then does
the magic begin.

Sometimes people cannot listen because they think that unless they are
talking, they are socially of no account. There are those women with
an old-fashioned ballroom training that insists there must be
unceasing vivacity and gyrations of talk. But this is really a strain
on people.

No. We should all know this: that listening, not talking, is the
gifted and great role, and the imaginative role. And the true listener
is much more believed, magnetic than the talker, and he is more
effective and learns more and does more good. And so try listening.
Listen to your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your
children, your friends, to those who love you and those who don't, to
those who bore you, to your enemies. It will work a small miracle. And
perhaps a great one.


(From the book Strength to Your Sword Arm: Selected Writings by Brenda
Ueland)

B.