When I taught the present perfect tense today, as many times before, I reflected on its philosophical richness. In particular, its context of conversation, which seems to me one of the highest of our arts. From salons, to dinner parties, to coffee shops, to even classrooms, conversation--the back and forth of thoughts, the circling round ideas, the disruptions of laughter and vehemence--is our Nile flood, irrigating and refertilizing our spirits and imaginations.
After a real conversation, as opposed to just a mutual reporting, I feel loosened, relaxed, aired out, enlarged. The familiar themes that have occupied my mind are gone (leaving space for new ones) or have been transmuted through their presentation to other minds. Aspects of who I am normally under wraps have gloriously disrobed and revealed themselves. It's a jubilee in the old sense of 'the prisons shall be opened and the captives all set free.' We find ourselves interesting to ourselves and each other and the world's glamor is restored.
Last Sunday I went over to see my friend Yori for the first time since I'd gotten back from Scotland. Our purpose: simply to converse. Our themes: what I'd seen and done; what he's been up to, especially related to the upcoming election; then into more general topics: energy, gardens, the winter coming up, the pleasures of tea... How pleasant his face, our tone, the cadences of our interaction, the way his mind works and what he comes up with.
In class, within the context of teaching English, I've been privileged to participate in conversations ranging widely over history, science, politics, personal history and ambitions, literature and art, everything between heaven and earth. The teacher/student distinction recedes. and we are just peers in our humanity considering existence itself. I listen and learn.
I'm comfortable being by myself but there are many more topics I'd like to converse on. Still I'm awkward outside formal or semiformal set ups. Only seldom do I strike up conversations with strangers, and when I do, I'm afraid to be too enthusiastic or whimsical. Sometimes I'm more interested more in topics than in my interlocutors. Maybe this is why these episodes abort before they really come alive.
The book to read on this head is Theodore Zeldin's An Intimate History of Humanity. He writes early on (in a chapter entitled How men and women have slowly learned to have interesting conversations) that so many conversations are 'fruitless' because 'conversation is still in its infancy,' and proceeds to explore its potential through the rest of the book.
Once upon a time, being a conversationalist was how you paid for your dinner at some patron's table. Quick wit, adroit transitions, dramatic flourish -were all part of the repertoire of skills of the frequently-invited. The aim was to whip up a confection of talk that made the occasion memorable. Sometimes the performance aspect showed too obviously through.
Today, we're not as good as saying or making sure we get what we want if conversation is our goal. We're often not supposed to express disagreement, for instance, or expose ourselves too much. Yet, where is it that we meet each other more fully as equals and friends than in this play which is serious, this seriousness which is playful?
Conversation for the sake of conversation: this is what friends do, and what makes friends of people previously unacquainted. Zeldin is right; we've only just begun.
No comments:
Post a Comment