Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives is a beautiful little book by British historian Theodore Zeldin. In an age of the zombie smartphone addict, the art of conversation seems like such an anachronism. Fortunately, Theodore Zeldin in his book, Conversation, aims to remind us of what we’ve forgotten – that the art of conversation is quintessentially human and should be developed and cherished:
“The peculiarity of humans is that they can watch themselves as they go about their business, as they talk and think. They have, as it were, two internal voices, so they can both create new ideas and look at them, criticize or admire. They can be either slaves of their thoughts and memories, or decide which of them are useful, which cause only trouble, and which to put away in a bottom drawer. Conversation with yourself is full of risk, because you have to decide how much to enhance your ideas with imagination. The really deprived are those who say they have no imagination, or no sense of humor, which is almost the same thing. Dostoyevsky claimed that it doesn’t matter what people say, only how they laugh. It’s true that you cannot be free or fully human until you laugh, because to laugh means to make your own judgment, to refuse to accept things at their face value, but also not to take yourself too seriously. That means inviting other people to your internal conversations and discovering that they see you quite differently from the way you see yourself.”
Zeldin reminds us that it is those meaningful conversations sprinkled throughout our lives that reveal deeper levels of who we are and open up new directions on our path:
“But how can conversations make so much difference? They can’t if you believe that world is ruled by over-powering economic and political forces, that conflict is the essence of life, that humans are basically animals and that history is just a long struggle for survival and domination. If that’s true, you can’t change much. All you can do is have conversations which distract or amuse you. But I see the world differently, as made of individuals searching for a partner, for a lover, for a guru, for God. The most important, life-changing events are the meetings of these individuals. Some people get disappointed, give up searching and become cynics. But some keep on searching for new meetings.”
What we miss with our 24/7 tech culture is the dynamic flow of a conversation, the back and forth and give and take that lets ideas develop and established view points be tested:
“Our private conversations do make a difference too the world. A relationship may start chemically or romantically but conversation adds something infinitely precious to it. Having one’s ideas challenged and transmuted by verbal intercourse makes one aware of how much one owes to others, how much a partner can contribute to one’s intellectual, moral and emotional development, though one remains a separate, unique person. It is in private that one can best learn how to accept criticism. ”
Zeldin: Conversation with a Stranger
Conversation between the same people can of course become stale, and so we need from time to time bring in new people into our lives to enliven the discussion. Often this happens when we travel, if we let it:
“But talking with people with whom we apparently have nothing in common seems to me to be worth pursuing even further. This is what travel confronts us with: meeting people living a completely different life, with different traditions of conversation. I believe that humanity is a family that has hardly met. One of the best ways it can meet is for our traditions of family hospitality to be revived; that is where conversations with strangers can fruitfully begin.”
Zeldin at his core is a lover of thinking and of the meeting of minds that happens in great conversations:
“I see thinking as bringing ideas together, as ideas flirting with each other, learning to dance and embrace. I appreciate that as a sensuous pleasure. Ideas are constantly swimming around in the brain, searching like sperms for the egg they can unite with to produce a new idea. The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates works of art out of ideas.“
The book is full of rich and wonderful stories and observations of life that Zeldin has made in his travels. He also has included many beautiful pictures and illustrations (like the one above) that he created himself. Pick it up and go have a conversation with someone…
-Jay Kshatri
www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com
