As I remember it the first thing that made me really wake up to the truth about ears was the fact that I never seemed to want to speak if I could help it, to an audience all made up of women, like a Woman's Club, or all made up of men, or to an audience all made up of very young people or of very old people, or of people who presented a solid front of middle age.
The trouble with a one-sexed audience or a one-classed audience seems to be that they all stop right in the middle of the same sentence sometimes and change to their outside ears all at once and before one's eyes. In any audience representing everybody when any one person feels like it, and goes off on some strange psychological trail of his all alone, one can keep adjusted and one soon begins to find that an audience of men and women both is easier to stand before than one which gives itself up to easy one-sex listening, because the ducks and dodges people make in one's meaning, the subterranean passages, tunnels and flights people go off on, from what one says, all check each other up and are different. When the women go under the men emerge. The same seems to be true in speaking to mixed ages. Fewer passages are wasted. Middle-aged people who remember, and look forward in listening always help in an audience because they seem to like to collect stray sentences cheerfully thrown away by people who have not started remembering much yet, or by people who do not do anything else.
I do not want, in making my point, to seem to exaggerate, but so far as what people do to me is concerned if people would get up and go out of a hall each sentence they stop listening or stop understanding, it would not be any worse—the psychological clang of it—than what they do do. It would merely look worse. The facts about the way people listen, about the way they use their two sets of ears on one, snap one out of their souls, switch one over from their real or inside ears to their outside ones, in three adjectives, are beyond belief. And they all keep thinking they are listening, too. One almost never speaks in public without seeing or expecting to see little heaps of missed sentences lying everywhere all around one as one goes out of the hall.
What is true of one's words to people one can keep one's eye on, is still more true of words in books.
If I could fit up each reader in this book with a little alarm clock or music box in his mind, that would go off in each sentence he is skipping without knowing it, nobody would disagree with me a minute for founding what I have to say in this book about changing people's minds upon the way people do not listen except in skips, hops and flashes to what they hear, the way they do not see what they look at, or the way they think, when they think, when they think they think.
(For every time I say "they" in the last paragraph will the reader kindly read "we.")
If there were some kind of moody and changeable type all sizes, kinds and colors, and if this book could be printed with irregular, up and down and sidling lines—printed for people the way they are going to read it, if the sentences in this chapter could duck under into subterranean passages or could take nice little airy swoops or flights—if every line on a page could dart and waver around in different kinds and colors of type, make a perfect picture of what is going to happen to it when it is going through people's minds, there is not anybody who would not agree with me that all these people we see about us who seem to us to be living their lives in stops, skips and flashes probably live so, because they listen so.
If the type in the pages in this book dealing with Mr. Burleson could be more responsive, could act the way Mr. Burleson's mind does when he reads it—that is if I could have the printer dramatize in the way he sets the type what Mr. Burleson is going to do with his mind or not do with his mind with each pellucid sentence as it purls—even Mr. Burleson himself would be a good deal shocked to see how very little about himself in my book, he was really carrying away from it.
If in Mr. Burleson's own personal copy of this book, I were to have this next chapter about him that is going to follow soon—especially the sentences in it he is going to slur over the meaning of or practically not read at all—printed in invisible ink and there were just those long pale gaps about him, so that he would have to pour chemical on them to get them—so that he would have to dip the pages in some kind of nice literary goo to see what other people were reading about him, he would probably carry away more meaning than I or any one could hope for in ordinary type like this, which gives people a kind, pleasant, superficial feeling they are reading whether they are reading or not.