Communication and Community

Abstract

“… conversation marks the voluntary opening of an invisible door that ends an inner isolation between persons. Their meeting and their conversation create for both a new situation out of which unpredictable developments may emerge. A genuine dialogue produces a new orientation for both participants. Two centers gravitate together, so that by standing at the same point each comes to see what the other sees. … In speech, a common past is both discovered and created…. Any genuine dialogue is worth studying, for in it life-stories are being told and re-told as a way of celebrating the death of an older world (before this particular meeting) and the birth of a new (in which these two are, as it were charter members).