The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [3]
Most thrillingly, conversation awakens us to one another, as in this rare happy tale from the wards of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability:
Young man with motorbike head injury in a coma. His mum, a keen evangelical, comes every day with friends to sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” by his bedside. She’s hoping to stimulate his brain into action. It works: he comes round, but he can’t speak. So they fit him up with one of those Stephen Hawking-type laptops, and the first words he speaks are: “For God’s sake, Mum, shut it!”
Two minds striking can kindle something magical. In his memoir, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Jean-Dominique Bauby, condemned to speak in eye blinks after a paralyzing stroke, snared it:
My communication system disqualifies repartee: the keenest rapier grows dull and falls flat when it takes several minutes to thrust it home. By the time you strike, even you no longer understand what had seemed so witty before you started to dictate it, letter by letter . . . I count this forced lack of humour one of the great drawbacks of my condition.
In short, conversation is second only to sex, a lot less hassle, and it really matters.
Perhaps your meals are a respectful communion with a television set and perhaps you like that just fine. Still, in the frame of human evolution, you’re a novelty, even a weirdo. Companionship (“the sharing of bread”) has ever been, if not the bread of existence, then the spirit that refreshed it, and conversation, once a broad term for “being together,” used to be considered so delicious as to be a sin. Monasteries and convents forbade it and totalitarian states monitored it, because it is unruly, fun, and seems utterly instinctive.
Casanova, visiting Louis XV’s palace, could hardly contain his laughter at the spectacle of the queen, dining alone at “a table that could have seated twelve,” while a dozen courtiers stood watch in a silence ruptured only by this solemn exchange, when she hailed a Monsieur de Lowendal:
“Madame.”
“I believe that chicken fricassee is the best of all stews.”
“I am of the same opinion, madame.”
But solitary dining, and living, no longer appear so unnatural.
WHY MODERN LIFE IS BAD FOR CONVERSATION
The irony of this communication age is that we communicate less meaningfully. Not despite but because of our dizzying means of being in touch. So many exchanges are conducted via electronic go-betweens that, what with the buzz, bleeps, and blinking lights, it is easy to overlook the super-responsive information technology that is live-action; up-close-and-personal; snap, crackle, and pop talk—one that has been in research and development for thousands of years.
Communication tools may bring us together, but equally they keep us apart, not least from the here and now. Laptops, BlackBerries, and three billion mobile phones have perforated the division between public and private, and we’re growing used to toting about portals of availability as if they were vital electronic organs. Men, women, and children stride about, bellowing unself-consciously into mouthpieces like deranged town criers, and entertainment permeates: Children watch films in the backs of car seats; on buses, TV screens assail passengers with cod-celebrity news; motion picture ad boards entice the riders of London underground escalators.
Today’s gizmogemony alters human experience in a way that trains, planes, automobiles, even the wheel, did not—nibbling at the conditions in which we operate, confusing the real with the virtual. Inevitably, this changes us.
Compared to face-to-face, Internet communication is two-dimensional. Yet the emphasis on appearances is growing, redefining how we relate, and with it, ideas of what constitutes a relationship. Many young people happily swallow the notion that textual exchange