In the last few weeks I’ve been struck by how little people actually talk about, in every sense. With most people, one talks very little, and what we talk about is itself little. . Weather, the kids, people’s last vacation……I want to talk about history, religion, literature.
It is such a strain, bringing the balloon of the mind into its narrow shed, as Yeats wrote.
But then I know other people have passionate interests of which I know nothing: you polymaths at the top, of course. And on a more quotidian level: sports and cars, f’rinstance.
To some extent, as I, a shy socially unconfident person, have recently decided, successful cocktail party conversation is mostly a matter of asking questions of the other person. This was a great relief to me, to realize others didnt care what I said, and were happy if simply prompted to go on with what they were saying. All I ever really had to say was “Really?” “How so?” “Tell me more.” How I wish I had figured that out decades sooner. Slow learner.
But, what about MY conversational needs?
I wish instead of name tags at a social event, or even a private dinner party, people would wear those little adhesive tags saying “history” , “religion”, “philosophy”, “poetry” ( oh, if ONLY! it CANT be just me…CAN it?) So you could know what you could say that might possibly interest the interlocutor, instead of risking such topics on someone who will, ASAP, politely excuse him/herself to get another drink.
Or, if disinhibited, possibly say, as my mother in law actually said to me once, “Are you really INTERESTED in all that gingerbread?”
(Yes I really AM, but I see that you aren’t, so…um….tell me bout your last trip.)
Welp— that’s what sites like this one are for, I reckon. And I’m grateful.
I brought up this quote with a Dem activist acquaintance of mine who desperately wanted to talk about people and not about their ideas:
Men and women range themselves into three classes or orders of intelligence; you can tell the lowest class by their habit of always talking about persons; the next by the fact that their habit is always to converse about things; the highest by their preference for the discussion of ideas.
Henry Thomas Buckle - Wikipedia according to Charles Stewart
The response I got from my acquaintance was:
I dont seek greatness as defined by the privileged
and countered with this quote:
To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.
I’ve been to events where everyone would have three keywords on their nametags, so that people would know what they might have in common.
That sounds like conversation heaven!
There’s the rub. “Successful cocktail party conversation” is almost by definition trite. Serious conversation about the Big Issues has to take place in an appropriate environment – and finding those environments can be a challenge.
One of the most serious, albeit brief, conversations I ever had took place on the unsteady deck of a small ship in a storm after an unpleasant incident. The captain observed – Every relationship requires a certain amount of tact if it is to work, and sometimes 100% of that tact has to come from one side. Maybe serious conversation requires specific times as well as specific places?
It might be easier to design these environments than to find them.
Here’s one possible template:
I read that in the 18th -19th century, all evening fêtes took place at the full moon, for that reason. We always walk after dark and I think about that all the time.
And yes, @Gavin , you’re right, too. Actually what I wrote yesterday is kinda…petulant. I imagine some interlocutor, glass in hand, fascinated by whatever I’M holding forth about, and I’d like to think I would never be bored by a topic in which somebody else had a deep, passionate interest. Everything is interesting, if you know something about it! But in actual practice I’m probably no better than anyone else. Carry on with the superficial pleasantries!
There is a fascinating book about the Lunar Society by Jenny Uglow “The Lunar Men: Five friends whose curiosity changed the world” (2002) – well worth reading.
It seems that not only does one need the right time and place for the kind of conversation Hypatia would like, one needs the right people – men like Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton. James Watt, Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly, and more.
We often speak of “science” as some wonder of an accelerator or interstellar telescope. Truth is science as we know it is also relatively new, having been created by Boyle I believe (one of the gas law guys) as a means of figuring our God better. The thinking was God was eminently logical, so His creation must also be. IF we can learn more about it, we will come closer to God.
Some of this kind of consideration came from a society that was quite well educated - in history, the philosophies, mathamatics, etc. Society of the time was, therefore, quite curious. I believe that made them willing to speak - and listen - to many different things, often things they knew nothing about (until after the conversation). I personally believe the Boob-tube has made idiots of many of us. Books are now more or less passe` and not nearly valued enough. Reading has become a lost art, and much of what is published these days is mental pablum.
I guess that’s “progress”. It is partially why the Democrat party has such sway in the nation I believe.
Your reply transported me back to the late 19th century (which actually went on till Edward VII’s death in 1910) the era of Shaw and Wells and as you say, the era when “science” burst upon the consciousness of the bon ton, the cream of society.
Have you ever seen Shaw’s play “Misalliance”? The cataclysmic change is so perfectly represented therein when at the end of Act 1, a small plane falls through the glass roof of the conservatory of an English country house— and the pilot is—a woman!
Although I think most of Shaw’s plays are hopelessly dated, taken as a whole—they hold up line by line, but his social themes though prophetic are now long fulfilled and superceded—THIS moment: the shattered glass roof, the apocalyptic intrusion of the ugly little machine, the pilot’s dramatic removal of goggles and aviator cap to shake out her long hair—is emblematic of the great turning.
( I think it’s also where I first heard the name “Hypatia”…!)
I read a teriffic book about HG Wells recently: “A Man of Parts”, by David Lodge.
Your thinking is timely with a quote used by a recent John Whitehead post.
“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”*- Neil Postman