bell - a verbalization of consciousness

On Listening...

Fragments of an unfinished entry from 10/18/2006:

Asking questions is a kind of virtue. Well, in it’s original intent. It demands three parts: one, a reservation of speech; two, an acute attention to the reply of another; and three, a genuine interest in one’s own understanding or to further the understanding of another. It’s quite easy to fail in any of these three areas.

For example, perhaps, one asks a question only to hear himself speak. Perhaps, a man asks a question to patronize the knowledge of another person, to show only his own brilliance and yet his boundless vanity. Perhaps, says he has a question, but only to reveal the absence of his presence by the multi-layers of his perogative and to continue speaking about a matter without ever really arriving at a question.