The Great Unending Conversation

I recently finished The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Comunity and read this quote from Kenneth Burke's "Unending Conversation":

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come in late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you.... However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still rigorously in progress.