(no subject)
"T- has a job as a waitress in a small café belonging to a married couple. The café brought in so little money the husband took a job somewhere else and they hired T- to take his place. The difference between the miserable salary he earned at his new job and the even more miserable salary they gave T- was their only profit.
T- serves the customers their coffee and Calvados (there are never very many of them; the café is invariably half-empty), and then goes back to her place behind the bar. There is almost always someone sitting on a bar stool waiting to talk to her. They all like her. She is a good listener.
But does she really listen? Or does she just look on, silent and preoccupied? I can't quite tell, and it really doesn't matter that much. What does matter is that she never interrupts anybody. You know what it's like when two people start a conversation. First one of them does all the talking, the other breaks in with "That's just like me, I..." and goes on talking about himself until his partner finds a chance to say, "That's just like me, I..."
The "That's just like me, I...'s" may look like a form of agreement, a way of carrying the other party's idea a step further, but that is an illusion. What they really are is a brute revolt against brute force, an attempt to free one's ear from bondage, a frontal attack the objective of which is to occupy the enemy's ear. All man's life among men is nothing more than a battle for the ears of others. The whole secret of T-'s popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She offers no resistance to the forces occupying her ear; she never says, "That's just like me, I..."
T- serves the customers their coffee and Calvados (there are never very many of them; the café is invariably half-empty), and then goes back to her place behind the bar. There is almost always someone sitting on a bar stool waiting to talk to her. They all like her. She is a good listener.
But does she really listen? Or does she just look on, silent and preoccupied? I can't quite tell, and it really doesn't matter that much. What does matter is that she never interrupts anybody. You know what it's like when two people start a conversation. First one of them does all the talking, the other breaks in with "That's just like me, I..." and goes on talking about himself until his partner finds a chance to say, "That's just like me, I..."
The "That's just like me, I...'s" may look like a form of agreement, a way of carrying the other party's idea a step further, but that is an illusion. What they really are is a brute revolt against brute force, an attempt to free one's ear from bondage, a frontal attack the objective of which is to occupy the enemy's ear. All man's life among men is nothing more than a battle for the ears of others. The whole secret of T-'s popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She offers no resistance to the forces occupying her ear; she never says, "That's just like me, I..."