Getting people to listen and not just hear is an important step
to improve communication. Hearing is passive. Listening is active.
We cannot help hearing but we have to want to listen.

by Roger Anderson
essay: Keeping the Message Consistent
in the book: Age of Conversation.

I

Tuco considers the ideas about conversation.
Clearly the key is the listening -
the concentrated act of listening.
He'd read something recently that got him going about this.
As he remembered the thread of it, you, as an interviewer,
don't follow a list of topics or questions,
you don't even follow what the person is saying,
rather, you look for the person,
seek the person within,
the one who was there long before this day.
Seeking, sort of, the Zen center of the person.

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue.
That's why there are so few good conversations:
Due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

Truman Capote

II

But Tuco knew you couldn't see that Zen center.
Feel it perhaps or get it in sideways glimpses
but never could you clearly see... clearly know.
But you look for it, you seek that aspect
when you listen,
when you fully listen.

Tuco wrote this out and sent it to Arlu.
He wondered how she'd see it.
She'd see it differently, he knew,
but he hoped to glimpse her
in a conversation about conversation.
 
He would listen as hard as he could.
She was someone he always looked for,
he always sought glimpses of her person within.
Her ever changing, ever emerging person within.