Motaz Omarien
This friend of mine never stops talking. His Finnish wife jokingly describes him as "suffering from verbal diarrhea." For all my own calm and quiet, he has a wondrous gift for talking — and, what's more, for drawing others into talk. He can speak for long hours on end, opening door after door of unending debate: religion, ethics, historical figures long dead who left behind them a barren argument that never dies.
He shares with me everything he hears, reads, watches, and lives. He is a lover of questions: he draws a question out of a question, extracts a conclusion from a conclusion, fashions a result from a result. He has an astonishing talent — a magnetic charisma — for turning any dialogue into a river that never runs dry.
My friend sets daily records in talking. An hour or two is, for him, an ordinary number; his true figures are five or six… and they can stretch to eight unbroken hours. And he is proud of it, as if it were a personal championship.
The strange thing is that this ever-talking friend does not like reading. He believes the age of reading is over, and that the age of listening and talking is what now prevails. No one reads, he says, because no one writes; and no one writes because no one reads. A vicious circle — one he breaks with talk that never ends. And it falls on you to find that wicked bond between yourself and the talkers who never stop.
Recently he invented what he calls "nonstop radio-radio": a marathon session of four, six, or eight hours, in which the host begins with a single question — and he takes over the answer… for a full hour or more. What a broadcast!
As for me, I do not know how to end this story. The listening hours go on, whether through my conversations with him or through his never-ending station. So there is no escape: I must cut the tale short here… and leave its ending hanging — just like his talk, which never ends.