On Being Heard

Every year there is a convention of American Booksellers. When I published my first book, years ago, my publisher ushered me in, and I was stunned. The Washington Convention Center covered a full city block, and the floor I was surveying covered that entire expanse with 50,000 books, all published that year. 

And I thought, how is my book ever going to get anyone's attention in all this?

The answer was, it wasn't. Mine was a voice, unamplified, lost in that ocean of voices all straining  to be heard.

I understood that old story about a child who grew up in a family with ten children. He never spoke a word and nobody noticed because everyone was always talking, at him, over him, for him.

And there is the questioin asked by Samuel Johnson, "Why is it there is so much writing in the world, and so little listening?"

Somewhere, in most human beings, is a desire to be heard, to express one's outrage or observation.  In Treme John Goodman plays a character in post Katrina New Orleans, a professor of English at Tulane, who records a UTube rant about how he and everyone in New Orleans is being ignored, not being heard, and he is outraged by what has happened to the city he loves.  Oddly, he has writer's block and cannot get going on his novel about New Orleans, even though he's got the advance in the bank, or maybe because he's got the advance in the bank.

Beneath all this is an idea somewhere, that talking, writing a blog, is a wasted effort.

If a tree falls in the wood and there is no ear to hear it, does it make a sound?

I would have to say, yes, but it doesn't matter.

The same may not be true of writing a blog. If nobody reads it, it is still a message sent, like those probes sent into outer space for intelligent beings who may never hear it. At least there is a reaching out, just in case, some day, someone will hear.

Or, even if nobody ever hears, you have had a conversation with yourself, and that, in the end, may be the most important audience.