Both students and professors were often discomforted by this collision of ideas as apparently contradictory as a painting, of a mountain, interrupted by the word Level.
" Stop me, " he said, " any time I say something you don't understand." Juan's roommate stopped him four times. And at each spot, Juan worked out a way to make his point more clearly.
It was like the sound of a church-bell: but it was only heard for a moment, for the rolling of the carriages and the voices of the multitude made too great a noise.
You might want to try pausing mid-story to ask the other person a question just to see if they ask you how that story ended or to find out that they were tuning you out the whole time.
Sorry to break it to you, but with increasing populations and climate change pandemics are likely to become more frequent, which means that this kind of social distancing might become the new norm.