listening you can do; hearing is the hard part · S5
I’d just sit there and Compare, I’d go to myself, like, “I never rolled a car,” “I never lost a wife,” “I never bled from the rectum.” Gene would tell me to just keep coming for a while and sooner or later I’d start to be able to both listen and hear. He said it’s hard to really hear. But he wouldn’t say what was the difference between hearing and listening, which pissed me off.
Context
The scene's explicit statement of the theme's one workable channel and its cost: hearing is not listening, it's hard, and nobody can tell you the difference — you have to keep coming until the wall of Comparison (the cataloguing of how you're not like the speaker) finally drops and sameness gets through. Reception is figured as a discipline no one can hand you and you can't reason your way into, only outlast. [sweep · shared-ground addiction-recovery]