The Fall from KnowHow

James, Madeline states, has lost his sense of audience.

In this field, in any field, in this market-world, these are damning words. To be missing a sense of audience is a learner's flaw. To lose it is either arrogant choice or disastrous circumstance. To refuse the audience is to slam shut the visor to shield one's convictions, truths. But the move also cuts off peripheral vision, the lay of the horizon that is waiting for our answer. Without a sense of audience we are just knights astagger around ourselves, made clumsier by our own protective dogmas.

Without a feel for our audience, we don't communicate, we pontificate.

James is, of course, fatigued, and that is what accounts for his state.

Still. It is a limiting perception, to say the least. You're just not listening. You are fooling yourself to think you can express it as if you were the only one listening.

Which you are not!