¶ Communicating (1)
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Index Entry
Throughout the last 20 years I have been meeting with and speaking to 1500 or 2000 people three or four times a week. As a consequence, I am absolutely confident that what is going on between me and an audience, as I think out loud, is absolutely metaphysical and weightless. It is understanding and meaning and has nothing to do with the length of the size of the words I am using, or the sound-wave disturbance I am making in the air, or the language I am employing. If we had no air to make sounds with, we would have to communicate with other tools. We could use electronic flash instruments and talk by dot-and-dash Morse code, or we could write and read one another. Each of us could use many telephone instruments. We could make color movie talkies and videocassetted 3-D documentaries of ourselves ‘thinking out loud,’ our seemingly live images appearing on our respective TV screens, but we would not be the TV sets. We would be, as we are now, only what each of us is communicating to one another in spoken words, gestures, postures, and flashes of the eye. We can’t see one another; we can see only our respective communications devices. I am quite confident that life is inherently immortal.
