At a family dinner or any gathering, the gift of your full attention is a form of hospitality, according to literary scholar Ronald Sharp, who, with Eudora Welty, coedited The Norton Book of Friendship, an anthology of works on the importance and meaning of friendship in which listening figures prominently. “You’re welcoming another person’s words and feelings into your consciousness,” he told me. “You are allowing that person to cross over the threshold and take up residence in your world.”
