Conversation
In the May 11 issue of the New York Review of Books, in a wonderful review of Stephen Miller's new book, "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art," (Yale University Press, 336 pp. $27.50), Russell Baker carries on a conversation of his own worth the price of the review.
I am a member of what we call, rather grandly for what it is, a Salon. Like the classical understanding from the 18th century, it refers to conversation (presumably once carried on in salons) in which no conclusion is reached nor expected and which has no agenda besides the mere pleasure of exploring whatever happens to arise in the course of 90 minutes.
Four of us, all men in our 60s, meet at a local Starbucks every other week and, over a latte, discuss everything from our distaste for current American foreign policy, to our increasing agnosticism about what is behind and beneath things, to our speculations about what sustains and derails long term intimacies of various sorts.
If we have anything in common - aside from our love of conversation - it may be our each having attempted over many decades to work out our relationship to the Christian religion and then to metaphysics in general.
And if anything characterizes our conversation it may be our common delight in imagining ways in which our own species has contributed to the inevitability of the end of our species. Likely most people listening in - and I sometimes wonder if those others in Starbucks lurking behind their laptop screens may be spying, wondering if they should report us to homeland security - might well regard us as sadists.
In fact what we are is old. And that is what I suspects makes our conversations so wide ranging and lacking in either panic or hostility. None of us expects to live a lot longer, nor do we any longer feel responsible for seeming to be working up solutions to the great dilemmas of our kind. Sardonic might describe it.
But the real point is delight in 90 minutes of conversation without direction or purpose. Miller says is has largely disappeared from our culture if not our world. He lays blame at the feet of all the electronic gagdets that clutter our days.
But what about this forum? I love having this conversation with you.
I am a member of what we call, rather grandly for what it is, a Salon. Like the classical understanding from the 18th century, it refers to conversation (presumably once carried on in salons) in which no conclusion is reached nor expected and which has no agenda besides the mere pleasure of exploring whatever happens to arise in the course of 90 minutes.
Four of us, all men in our 60s, meet at a local Starbucks every other week and, over a latte, discuss everything from our distaste for current American foreign policy, to our increasing agnosticism about what is behind and beneath things, to our speculations about what sustains and derails long term intimacies of various sorts.
If we have anything in common - aside from our love of conversation - it may be our each having attempted over many decades to work out our relationship to the Christian religion and then to metaphysics in general.
And if anything characterizes our conversation it may be our common delight in imagining ways in which our own species has contributed to the inevitability of the end of our species. Likely most people listening in - and I sometimes wonder if those others in Starbucks lurking behind their laptop screens may be spying, wondering if they should report us to homeland security - might well regard us as sadists.
In fact what we are is old. And that is what I suspects makes our conversations so wide ranging and lacking in either panic or hostility. None of us expects to live a lot longer, nor do we any longer feel responsible for seeming to be working up solutions to the great dilemmas of our kind. Sardonic might describe it.
But the real point is delight in 90 minutes of conversation without direction or purpose. Miller says is has largely disappeared from our culture if not our world. He lays blame at the feet of all the electronic gagdets that clutter our days.
But what about this forum? I love having this conversation with you.
posted by Blayney at 12:43 PM
2 Comments:
It would be more of a "conversation" if we responded more often. But I don't - not because your posts are boring - far from it - but out of the drive to "quite surfing and get to work" part of my gut-level heritage.
the conversation for me is made richer - or at least easier to follow - when there are written responses, but like my journal, the conversation with the universe goes on no matter. My ego is stroked when I find someone has actually read something I have written, but the better part of me knows my part is finsihed when I write it.
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