The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [36]
You need a topic.
TIMELESS MEASURES FOR TAILORING TOPICS?
We think of topics as abstract nouns with capital letters—Love, War, God—but the terrain shifts with time and tide. A minefield once yawned between men and women, so much so that evil Queen Victoria strove to deter suitors for her youngest daughter (whom she wished to retain as a companion in old age) by expedient dullness. One man recalled:
Sitting next to a beautiful princess is a reward for bravery in fairy stories, but if the gallant man were popped down every night next to Princess Beatrice, he would soon cease to be brave. Not that she has nothing to say, for when the subject moves her, she has a torrent, but what with subjects tabooed, the subjects she knows nothing about, and the subjects she turns to the Queen upon, there is nothing left but the weather and silence.
Still, rationing spurred ingenuity. A debutante snaffled Britain’s richest duke with graceful disquisitions on “ghosts and the royal family,” honoring the double-edged ethos that gals should lead conversation, but never, ever come over as clever. My granny held that wherever she was, however grim the circs—and as a nurse in the Second World War, grim they often were—babies and the price of fish perked things up. But her modest topic store would not stretch far today.
Now information is wireless and free-range, no princess may be sequestered from it, however high her tower. And if Granny’s generation could confidently assert do not discuss War, Politics, Money, Sex, God, or Death, such iron certainties toppled before the Iron Curtain, attitudes drifting from nothing to anything goes. It might even be argued that conversation skills have slackened because we’re spoiled for topical choice. Imagine the stamina necessary to eke out ghosts and the royal family over the duration of a dinner date, before tabloids made them such toothsome subjects.
Yes, we have it easy. But as anyone who has put her foot in it will testify, there remains such a thing as the wrong topic of conversation. How do you tell?
By the silence.
➺ Rule one: Good topics create talk
Far from fixed Abstract Nouns with Capital Letters, the elusive What we are talking about keeps moving, slipping down side alleys, emerging as something else entirely, due to conversation’s spirit-charging ability to summon up ideas.
It’s the law of the conversation jungle: Either fresh talking points sprout from the old, new ones are grafted on, or the whole fragile ecosystem conks out.
➺ Rule two: Topics are unstable mixtures of attitude and subject
Aristotle had a neat concept for explaining what enables topics’ polymorphous perversity: the active intellect. In brief, inside Homo sapiens’ lively mind lie imaginary versions of the world, and in the collective craft of conversation, we trade perceptions and ideas: a wondrous capacity that has enabled us to transform each other’s views and, with them, the world.
On the small scale, simply exchanging words is alchemy, altering topics each time they pass from person to person. Just as syntax, the arrangement of words, shapes meaning and clarity, so conversation has its own dynamic syntax, as thoughts conjoin and separate with the ripping speed of Velcro. The better they do, the better we get along.
➺ Rule three: A topic’s fitness endures with the thrill of the chase
In an ideal world, as the libertine author of 1673’s Means to Oblige in Conversation wrote, a subject, “the quarry of two heated minds, springs up like a deer out of the wood.” However,
There is nothing in a subject, so called, that we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings of desire.
As for where to hunt, his advice was simple: “Speak . . . to the purpose.” Which seems sensible: The original Greek word, topos, means “place,” so a topic can hardly be out of it. (The word is Aristotle’s, from his Ta Topika—“On Commonplaces.”)
➺ Rule four: Topics must be relevant and accessible
That is to say, a good