From Robyn on Patreon in 2024
Communication: the big one. You can express yourself in any way the law allows, but how that lands on the runway of another person’s consciousness is largely up to them. So the ability to ‘read the room’ is a big asset in human relationships. If you’ve been reading the room, of course, you may know this already. Why, most likely you know where the story goes from here, and how it all ends. And, yes, maybe you will tell me that everything is inevitable in hindsight; if, of course, I haven’t told you that first.
Still, if we’re telling each other the same thing, then we must be on the same page, as we read the room together like two myopic koalas. Subtitles, however, might reveal a different story: we could have no philosophy at all, sitting in our twin desert purgatories, screaming silently into the void.
“How long has this been going on?” sang the band Ace in the mid-1970s. The answer is probably, at least 300,000 years - ever since the dawn of human speech. Back then, of course, it would have been a matter of reading the cave. But before people could speak, it was surely easier to understand what they were saying…