The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [9]
As Nicholas Humphrey demonstrated, good conversationalists see others’ perspectives, so have less destructive arguments. They don’t, unlike the last, word-cudgelling president of the United States, inhabit an either/or universe. To assert that “you’re with us or against us” is to quash debate, leading to bad decisions.
In 1940, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the British diplomat who helped forge the kingdom of Iraq, wrote:
The value of personal contacts and friendships has been proved over and over again in the Middle East, and the evil effects of aloofness and indifference are clear for all to see.
If only the lesson were learned. Not talking—failure to acknowledge the other point of view, never mind engage with it—polarizes, killing debate. In its absence, silence breeds suspicion, anger, and violence, creating further distance—distance that comes to seem unbridgeable, faced with the unspeakable.
My hell is not, as it was for Sartre, other people. It is a twenty-first century with six billion plus of us, on a shrinking planet, with dwindling resources, not talking. Lose the means to work out who we are, what we have in common, and we lose stories, the greatest consolation. Novelist John Steinbeck understood the creative balm of sympathy:
We are lonesome animals. We spend all of our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel—“Yes, that is the way it is, or at least that is the way I feel it.”
Guazzo was right, conversation gives us humanity. Without it we’re less than the sum of our parts, unable to improvise or be what roguish seventeenth-century philosopher Francis Bacon called a “ready man.” And we need to be. Service industry is the future, and if not the cheapest workers, we’d better be smarter to beat the competition. In a sense many of us are already courtiers. Yet the decline in everyday courtesy—failure to meet the eye, switch off that phone—attests to an urgent need to reawaken nerve endings.
Historically, the periods when conversation was most revered have been among the most fruitful for reason, invention, and respect for the individual; times when people believed that their opinions could change the world. Think of the babbling coffee houses frequented by Samuel Johnson and enlightened chums; the great French salons, which brought together thinkers and artists and politicians, galvanizing mind-shifts and freedoms from which the West continues to benefit. For Johnson and company, newspapers and print sped up talk. The Internet can do more for us if we’re sane about it. This is an exciting time for conversation. Potentially.
Stand on each other’s shoulders and we can, like acrobats, build pyramids. Just as Jimmy Connors raised John McEnroe’s game, so Coleridge spurred Wordsworth, so the Almohad court propagated scientific and cultural advance. What would Shakespeare, Jonson, and chums have been had they not met in pullulating Elizabethan London and hung out at the Mermaid Tavern, where pub banter was:
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame
As if that every one from whence they came
Had meant to put his whole wit in a jest,
And had resolved to live a fool the rest
Of his dull life—
Einstein appreciated this: He trundled to his office in Prince-ton’s Institute for Advanced Study solely for “the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” Three freewheeling years of chatter led Francis Crick and James Watson to their epochal discovery of the structure of DNA. Do I hear you ask, “But is it art?”
Were it not for mental and social workouts at a tertulia, a salon in Barcelona that he came to dominate like Barnum did his circus, seventeen-year-old Picasso might not have become a genius anecdote-teller, as well as a poet (little appreciated outside Spain), or won the renown and contacts that eased his