Good Listeners

A popular literary journalist1 began thinking about the telephone and how it affects people’s lives …

He thought of the people who might be anxiously hoping to hear a doctor’s voice say, “The x-rays were negative.”

He thought of young sweethearts who might be anxiously hoping to hear the telephone ring and that special someone say, “I love you.”

And, suddenly, he fervently wished that he could call all the people in the world who were waiting by their telephones and tell them the good news they wanted to hear.

Many of us — perhaps most of us — experience beautiful moments such as that. But often our good intentions are circumvented by the same sense of powerlessness the well-intentioned…