The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [6]
Conversation absorbs more of our senses than listening to music.
I don’t hate technology: I used to thank Christmas I had television instead of a weekly gawk at stained-glass windows, or whatever passed for entertainment in Granny’s day. (With TV, hell, who needed imaginary friends?) But I slightly fear it. Computers and their ancillaries are evolving exponentially faster than we human animals, supplanting our creature comforts, yet in no way altering our Stone Age emotional or social needs.
Are we serving tools made to free us, like the conscientious gym slaves who, rather than eat less, burn hours servicing the surplus calories of the low-input banquet that is the daily bread of the sedentary, developed world? Whatever else, like it, hate it, in and out of cyberspace, we’re undergoing self-consciousness hyperinflation.
Social psychologist Sonia Livingstone said of today’s image-conscious teenagers:
Celebrity is about people being interested in you when you fall over in the pub. . . . There’s an element of them being their own self-production.
The change is as profound and spirit-pummeling as that brought by the mirror and the portrait, which in the seventeenth century heralded new levels of self-fashioning, guardedness, and melancholy—to historian Lionel Trilling, “a mutation in human nature.” Just as the camera and the moving image, for all their inspiration, helped mass-produce self-awareness, alienation, and longing, making (with the aid of mechanized murder) depression the black dog of the twentieth century.
But while we may feel splintered, juggling ten roles a day where our parents had two or three, we need our distractions too: That is what other people are for. As social networking sites and three billion mobile phones testify, we still crave to meet new people, hear what they have to say. And the joke is, despite the loquacious pyrotechnics that passed for the conversational genius of Oscar Wilde, conversation isn’t a performance. It takes two or more people and two things: attention and interest.
We can easily fold more of it into our life, and it’s imperative that we try, not just for ourselves. The tide against conversation has a powerful undertow.
THE LOGIC OF RUDENESS
Manners are shaped by their times. At medieval revels communal dishes gave an incentive to greedy guts with sharp knives and elbows. In ritzy Renaissance Italy, however, the new-minted fashion for genteel meals, with individual place settings and multiplying forks and spoons, “reconfigured” pecking orders and definitions of good behavior. This created a niche, and conduct manuals, like Stefano Guazzo’s 1574 best seller, Civile Conversation, the earliest treatise on the subject, sprang up to fill it, with advice on how to plug gaps between courses with suitably pitched chitchat.
Today, industrialization is on the march, social fragmentation litters its progress, and as manners thin to accommodate over-stretched lifestyles, a time-paring, talk-sparing attitude is spreading, and it stinks. If you’re watching the clock, awaiting a text, how easy is it to sit back, relax, and enjoy the present company? Think of the cannibalistic romantic scene parodied in Sex and the City, where dates are debated like commodity trades. Do you want to laugh or cry at the true story of Manhattan child Olivia Gopnik, whose imaginary friend, Charlie Ravioli, too busy “grabbing lunch” to play, eventually hired an “imaginary secretary” to keep Olivia at bay?
Yet some yearn for even fewer social niceties. Like Oscar-winner Halle Berry:
Being politically correct is bullshit. I want to know how someone really feels, what I’m dealing with. I want to know who you really are, and then maybe we can have a conversation.
Sadly, her dream of transparency belongs in la-la land, and is far from universal.
Generally speaking, the more individualist a society, the more direct its manners. While many Americans prefer an up-front approach, collectivist societies tend to favor indirectness. Such as urban southern