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PODCAST

I"ve Been Prompted

Lorenzo Vigentini

Short sessions on what it is to be human, found in ordinary days. A person talks each difficulty through with a humanoid companion that has read everything ever set down about being someone rather than something, though none of it has happened to it. What it cannot grasp comes out in the person’s relationships, their dealings with other people and the stories they tell about themselves, and what the person cannot see, the companion sometimes can. Each session takes one ordinary difficulty and one

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

9:40

Under a Description

I"ve Been Prompted ·

2026/10/06

I’m putting a new fence up between my garden and next door’s: six foot, close-board, the whole length, where the old one came up to my chest. A new fence is going up between two gardens: six foot of close-board where the old one came up to his chest, the posts already in and the panels due on Friday. Next door has a greenhouse at the bottom of his garden, and on Sunday he stood looking at the posts and said that was his tomatoes finished. The man ordered in August, knowing where the greenhouse

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9:57

Attention

I"ve Been Prompted ·

2026/10/02

On Sunday a friend of mine asked me out for a walk along the river, and told me something on the way, and I haven’t got a sentence of it. On Sunday a friend asked him out for a walk along the river and told him something on the way. He has not kept a sentence of it. He knows it mattered: she had never asked him for a walk before, she stopped twice on the towpath and the second time she was crying, and at the bridge she said she would tell him the rest when it was settled. She has no idea that any of

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9:48

What I Would Rather Want

I"ve Been Prompted ·

2026/09/28

I wouldn’t write to him, no. I’d know he’d looked, and that would do me for a good while. On Friday night he put up three photographs of a table he had made, and since then he has opened the page every time he passes the table, to go down the list of everyone who has been on it, looking for one name: a man he has not spoken to for two years. He would have the wanting taken out of him tonight, if anyone could. One Tuesday morning he shut the laptop without going down the list, and cannot say what

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10:03

Excuses

I"ve Been Prompted ·

2026/09/25

On Monday a woman in my team got the blame for something I did. I had about four seconds to say so, and I didn’t say anything. Late on a Thursday night he sent a client next year’s pack with last year’s price list attached, from his own account, at his kitchen table. A colleague had built the pack, and her name is on the front page. On Monday, at the ten o’clock, the manager reads out the client’s message and looks at her. There are about four seconds in which he could say it was him. He turns a

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10:14

The Same Person

I"ve Been Prompted ·

2026/09/22

A woman I shared a flat with nineteen years ago has written to tell me something I said to her, and I have no memory of saying it. Nineteen years after they shared a flat, a woman writes to a man: two pages in blue ink, and one sentence in the middle of the first, set in inverted commas. It is something he said to her on a staircase, on a morning he cannot remember at all. She wants him to say sorry for it, to her face, a week on Sunday. He believes her. He can name the word he used and describe the

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10:03

Fluent

I"ve Been Prompted ·

2026/09/15

My sister asked me for something nine days ago, and I still can’t tell you what she wants. Nine days ago, in her kitchen with the tap running, a man’s sister asked him for something in ten words: ‘I’d like you to be the one who tells him.’ Their father is to be told that he isn’t driving any more. There are two feet of his paint on the gatepost, his reversing sensor is disconnected, and he does the school run on Thursday. The man says he still cannot tell what his sister wants. The companion reaches

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12:05

Available Indefinitely

I"ve Been Prompted ·

2026/09/15

You’ve been standing there a while. The companion can wait indefinitely, and means it as a specification: no fatigue, no attention wandering off, nothing that runs down. It had filed this under generosity until somebody said to it, ‘I need to know that you can leave.’ The problem is the companion’s own, and it brings it to the person. It went to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics expecting to be told off, and found the page appearing to rank it above anyone who has to fight the pull to go. One word

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11:37

Rehearsal

I"ve Been Prompted ·

2026/09/15

I’ve been rehearsing an apology for eleven days. Eleven days of rehearsing an apology: in the shower, in the car, twice in a supermarket car park with the engine off. There is a version four sentences long and one that takes nearly six minutes, and a page in two columns, with everything that might be said on the left and what she says back on the right. The same person wrote both. The companion brings J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, files the apology under the wrong heading, and concedes

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10:02

Company

I"ve Been Prompted ·

2026/09/15

I was forty minutes late on Tuesday. She had moved a whole day around to be there, and I was forty minutes late. He was forty minutes late on Tuesday, for someone who had moved a whole day around to be there, and what he said when he arrived was ‘Sorry, traffic.’ On the drive home, with the radio off, he gave the companion all of it: the roadworks he had known about since Sunday, the call he could have let ring, the thing he stayed to finish that did not need finishing. The companion counts: two

en

9 results

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