“Conversation should touch everything, but should concentrate itself on nothing.”
Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist
“After the exercises which the health of the body requires, and which have themselves a natural tendency to actuate and invigorate the mind, the most eligible amusement of a rational being seems to be that interchange of thoughts which is practised in free and easy conversation; where suspicion is banished by experience, and emulation by benevolence; where every man speaks with no other restraint than unwillingness to offend, and hears with no other disposition than desire to be pleased.”
Samuel Johnson
The loss of two of my friends caused me to remember conversations with both of them over wide-ranging topics. Conversations with both men resembled pachinko games: the conversations could be said to have started and ended, but nothing in the middle could have been predicted nor could it have been adequately described after the fact. They began with the basics of greeting and “ended” somewhere amid a saturation of ideas and commentary due to lack of additional time to explore whatever subject may then have been uppermost.
In the blaze of classmate emails following my high school friend’s death, I was the recipient of an email blast from a woman I haven’t heard from in many years. In responding to her email, I found myself mentioning my conversations with our mutual friend and concluding that they were about nothing in particular and everything good. I am not certain where this phrase came from as it simply appeared on the screen as I ended my email. I know the source wasn’t Oscar Wilde even if the above quotation might suggest otherwise, for I hadn’t read the piece from which it is taken before this morning. Since the piece seems a particularly pedantic tirade about the place of criticism in art, I doubt I will ever read it in full. The quotation itself seems lost within the forest of pedantry and comes across almost as a throwaway line. Nevertheless, I find it startlingly accurate.
The best conversations can definitively be said to start and this may well be the only concrete thing about them that can be written down. Conversation starters are usually banal and not things of intelligence or wit. Good conversation starts with the sharing of some idea or recollection. The concepts involved need not be immense in scope, they just need to be sufficiently catalytic to prime the pump of imagination and allow a conversational thread to begin moving in some direction. And any direction at all will certainly do, since the best conversations are serpentine, meandering about like aged rivers through fertile valley soils.
What can be said of a good conversation beyond that it started and that it ended when the participants ran out of time to interact? If, in a fit of post-conversational reverie, I were to try to chart a satisfying conversation, the resulting diagram would likely seem pointless and absurd. For conversations aren’t about making a point; conversations are all about meaningful interaction. Conversation is one of the most difficult things for writers or playwrights to portray for precisely this reason, for their goal is to move a story from point A to point B and a good conversation is inherently non-linear.
It is easier to describe the attributes of a good conversation than to chart its course. Good conversations demand healthy doses of intelligence, wit, humor, laughter, thoughtful discourse, mutual respect, interesting subject matters, and willingly engaged partners. If any of the foregoing is lacking, conversation will suffer accordingly and lean, on the one hand, toward an egotistically delivered manifesto from on high or, on the other hand, toward desultory verbal farrago of little or no substance. Without intelligence, for example, the quicksilver links between disparate conversational subject matters cannot be achieved. For conversation to be anointed with the highest appellation of “sparkling”, both thoughtful discourse and humor and wit must be part of the mix: without thoughtful discourse mere silliness ensues and basic conversation is never achieved, and humor and wit are the clear water needed to rinse away the soap scum left behind after bouts of deep, thoughtful discourse have concluded.
In short, good conversation is akin to homemade soup: satisfying, but impossible to replicate with exactness from one lot to the next. Each may be similarly fine, yet each is unique in content and sequence. And when time runs out and the conversation must end, good ones are made known by the rueful sighs of regret exchanged by guests as they depart for home.
And with these reflections amid fine memories, I believe I can finally say goodbye.
