the humility necessary to listen

After a certain lecture which had as usual bewildered the sober note-takers (the serious people laboring to understand by writing parts down, making decisions about what was important to write down and what wasn’t, seeking a pattern in what was said, attempting to get a fix on it—determining its coordinates like an alien craft’s) a photographer came up to [Gertrude] Stein. He was elated, ravished by what she had been saying. It was no trouble for him to understand as it was for the audience which had come with the intention of understanding rather than with the intention of taking pictures for the local newspaper. His ease was no surprise to Gertrude Stein. The photographer had simply listened and therefore he had understood, since what Gertrude Stein was saying was always simple, plus she repeated it. The serious note-takers couldn’t listen and therefore couldn’t understand because they were trying to remember.

The serious note-takers intended to make sense later of what Gertrude Stein was saying, so they needed to remember the main points of her lecture. They would not have been pleased with the idea that they didn’t have to go back to their offices and make sense of it because it already was sense. One might say that they lacked the humility necessary to listen. One might observe that, paradoxically, what appeared to be submissive behavior on the part of the note-takers, taking notes, was in fact arrogance.

But of course the serious note-takers were not worse people than the photographer. The photographer’s humility was no more intentional than the note-takers’ arrogance. The humility necessary to listen cannot be achieved head-on, and that is what gave the photographer his edge. He was partly thinking about getting good photographs—about his equipment, about the lighting. He didn’t have to concern himself with these professional things very much because they were almost automatic, but a little. This slight distraction, this slight angle that his job as photographer required, along with the feeling that he was not a professional in the area that Gertrude Stein was talking about, made him more open to what she was saying. He wasn’t going to have to summarize her remarks or offer an evaluation. He was just the newspaper photographer.

Isn’t it odd to think that in order to listen we must be a little bit relieved of the intention to understand?

 

- Kay Ryan, from her essay "Notes on the Danger of Notebooks", originally published in Parnassus Review and included in her essay collection Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose. You can read the whole essay here.