Hi everybody! 'Hope you had a good Christmas! Me, it's a holiday morning and I just got out of bed after lying there for an hour daydreaming. Usually I forget thoughts like that but today I had a pen and paper handy and I managed to write down some of them. See what you think.
Okay, lying under the covers I found myself wondering if there ever was such a thing as conversation. I don't mean that conversational skills are lacking today, I'm questioning whether they ever existed at all, in any period of history. We all assume they did because they're embedded in things like novels, but did they? What if novelists made it up?
Storytellers are always doing that. Torrid love scenes, super villains in mountain fortresses, Gothic mansions with insane caretakers...they make up all sorts of things to keep you turning the pages. Maybe they make up the idea of conversation, too. After all, they have to have something to put between the action scenes.
In real life dialogue never ends the way it begins. It meanders all over the place. A conversation that begins with "Hmmmm...I wonder if drug abuse is an unintended consequence of Prohibition?" immediately takes a right angle turn with a reply like "Drugs? I have a nephew who takes drugs" which provokes the reply, "My dog used to eat aspirin" which provokes, "I don't like dogs. They bark too much." which provokes "Well, cats are no better." Real world dialogue constantly digresses like that and nothing is ever resolved. I figure there's half a chance that it was always that way.
I know what you're thinking, that smart people don't talk like that. Actually they do. A professor might say to another professor: "I can't forgive Plato for wanting to censor art" then his friend says "He didn't want to censor art. You'd know that if you read the whole book instead of the first half." then the first guy says, "Look who's talking, you never finish a book." then the other says, "And you never bus your own dishes in the cafeteria."
4 comments:
Interesting thoughts. In some ways I'm glad that conversations are generally like this. If conversations stayed too fixed on one subject then there would be less room for the meandering that results in creativity. On the other hand though, it's good to have a certain amount of focus so that any particular subject can be discussed in satisfactory depth.
Yes! This is absolutely maddening! But, I wonder if you are right...I definitely crave classic Golden Age Hollywood-style conversation, and am constantly disappointed by the asinine, trite, and mundane meanderings it usually takes...Was artful focused conversation (outside of a college lecture) ever widespread?
GW: That's what friends are for...even digressions with the right person can be interesting.
Andy: I took the stand that real conversation was always rare but I have no way of knowing for sure. It's just a guess.
If it was rare that would explain why, with so many smart people in the world, we're not living in some futuristic paradise.
I do have a suggestion for getting more out of the conversations we do have, and that is: listen. If your friend says something interesting then pursue the subject. Ask questions, see if there's something worth finding out about there.
My own belief is that other people have the answers to at least half of the questions we're interested in. How often have you said in exasperation, "I wish I'd known that before I went ahead and did..."?, and your friend says "But I warned you about that last year, remember?" And, come to think of it, he did!
My New Years resolution to myself is to take what other people say more seriously.
it really existed!:
http://www.online-literature.com/stevenson/essays-of-stevenson/4/
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