The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [14]
Faces reveal useful information too. Your smile should reach your eyes because if the orbicularis oculi muscles don’t contract, smocking your crow’s feet, it will be read as false. Moreover, your eyes should reach into the other person’s. True, not long ago debutantes embarking on the husband-fishing trip that was “The Season” were advised, “Never look a man straight in the eye.” Such a gaze, counseled M. Dono Edmond, adviser to Queen Marie of Romania no less, informs its object that “you are trying to probe his mind.” Heaven forfend. . . .
But for artful conversation between equals, inattention tenders disaster. Take Ronald Reagan, never one to overlook niceties. At his adopted son’s graduation, after he was famous but years before he was the U.S. president, he ambled around, extending his hand, saying, “My name is Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?”
Eventually he bumped into his son. Out went the mitt.
“My name is Ronald Reagan. What’s yours?”
Isn’t it tempting to read intimations of senility in his faux pas? Friendly as can be, yet so far, far away....
Missteps during greetings not only put people on guard instead of persuading them to lower it, but also prime them to expect that the blunderer isn’t worth talking to. Charm can’t work on autocue, and as somebody should tell Bono, the truly charismatic don’t show off; they’re too busy, having eyes only for you.
MAPPING BOUNDARIES
The passive-aggressive grin makes a poetically fitting start to conversation, since it recalls that human relations have always been unequal parts antagonism and cooperation. Although smiling is an ancient primate inheritance, we hang on to it, because at root, conversation is our species’ miraculous innovation (catalytic converter?) for managing the tension between our desire to connect and our need for independence; a tension that has been nothing if not creative. As conversation developed, it allowed us to turn thoughts to words to collaborative deeds that led Homo sapiens out of the woods, and on to run the planet—more or less.
Civility enabled this evolution. The word’s meaning has been diluted, but to have a civil tongue in your head was once the prized asset of a privileged social group; like “citizen,” “civility” spoke of a world that favored discussion over violence or despotism (both derive from civitas, “self-governing community”). For Ancient Roman Cicero, the first thinker to explore the grammar of conversation, civility safeguarded “community” by “assigning to each individual his due” and making a “habit of affability.” This remains true today.
➺ Rule six: Respect territorial claims
We soon dread the kind woman we meet twice daily at the school gate, if each time she hugs us like a long-lost child, because little civilities remain important protocols for calibrating intimacy. They pace out the distance between us at the same time as draw us together. And if conversation’s primary aim is to map common ground, greetings demarcate personal space.
What contact is too intimate? The territory is fluid. Although air kisses are bubbling up outside luvviedom, most Britons still shake hands then draw back, and don’t hug strangers. However, five centuries ago Italian visitors to England were aghast not at stiff upper lips, but at having to smack them:
If a foreigner enters a house and does not first of all kiss the mistress on the mouth, they think him badly brought up.
France currently favors two-way kiss trades, yet in 1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, new to America, made a shattering discovery: “Everyone shakes hands.” To a post-Revolutionary Frenchman, such manifest egalitarianism was wildly touchy-feely. Then again, unlike his predecessor Reagan, George W. Bush considered handshakes high-risk. On first meeting freshman senator Barack Obama, Bush offered a squirt of the antiseptic with which he had been anointing the presidential palm:
“Want some? Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds.”
In general an unlikely weapon for biological attack, a handshake remains the safest gesture for greeting someone new. In fact, it came into use