The Lost Art of Conversation (1899)
saturdayeveningpost.com
saturdayeveningpost.com
After reading it, I thought it was funny to imagine "reading" replace with "Instagram" in the original author's invective. It would be so much fun to live in a world where everyone was constantly reading books everywhere now! But, these days, whenever there's an idle moment, most people reach for their phones and plug in to the nearest dopamine feed.
Maybe this is just how it goes. In 25 years, maybe everyone will just don their VR goggles while they're on public transit, and people will long for the days when everyone sat around scrolling their phones, and it was still possible to make eye contact.
Then take a peek at the first one, "The Egregious Now". I don't think you even have to change a single word!
A phone looks like a phone, it is very hard to know what people do on it. They could make a bank transfer, read Aristoteles, look at puppy pictures, read the news, chat to an old friend, ...
My favorite random book purchase was from a multi-generational bookstore in San Francisco. Like many, it had succumbed to the pressures of rising rent and declining interest in musty parchment. In their going-out-of-business clearance pile, I happened upon an oversized binding of newspapers from Manchester, England. Partially water damaged on the edges but perfectly legible. Upon opening the book, curiosity quickly escalated to bibliophilic euphoria. This collection turned out to be from the early 1940's during The Blitz when the Nazis were bombing the shizer out of England.
The best part... the Ovaltine ads. Apparently, Ovaltine used to be sold as a health elixir to calm your nerves before bed. I'm not sure how a chocolate malt drink aids sleep, but they must have sold well because the half and full page ads were in every paper. I've never had the pleasure of speaking with someone who grew up in Manchester during that time. What strange association they must have for Ovaltine. Comfort or terror? Hard to say.
I recently read some books written during the late 1800's through to World War 1 about sniping (aka long distance military shooting).
It was fascinating on so many levels:
- The language was completely readable. On the one hand that makes sense but on the other it's wild to read something from over 100 years ago and still find it enjoyable and get a lot of the jokes etc
- Seeing a discipline still relatively in its infancy develop in combat conditions was incredibly interesting. One book in particular mentions the psychology and persuasion required to convince command to adopt new technologies and tactics
At the end of the day, you realize "we're all just people" spending a large amount of our time dealing with other people. The clothes and technologies change but we still stay largely the same.
[1] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/09/the-lost-art-of-...
With the conversation article itself, the complaints he raises are overblown even looking back at it now. I've lived in many countries and traveled to many more, and one thing I've always taken note of is how and when people hold conversations: it depends almost entirely upon local culture. You're much more likely to have conversations with strangers in the countryside than in the city. You're FAR more likely to have a conversation with random Portuguese than with random Germans. Traveling Japanese are far more interesting and open than Japanese at home, whereas the opposite could be said of the British. The Vietnamese keep to themselves whereas Cambodians are happy to meet strange people. People are far more friendly in Lyon than in Paris. San Franciscans are far more likely to talk at you than with you (even vs just across the bay in Oakland).
So usually I just listen to people talk about themselves. :/
To your point, though, I live in a major and supposedly-sophisticated city, and one of my go-to smalltalk questions is, "So, what're you reading these days?"
I don't know if I've become an old grump — or if I just have poor luck of the draw — but lately it's been a deeply depressing question. A staggering number of people will quietly (or, occasionally, proudly) unveil the fact that they don't read at all.
EDIT: (Both of the stories are fiction, they're not scientific literature, if you're looking for non-fiction that had me pumped, here ya go: "Life brought to artificial cells" [2])
The story that hooked me is: "I cultivate passively" [0], it's quite brutal though and at times the writing can feel a bit amateurish, but it still got me hooked.
But the story I've been reading for the past two days is: "Reborn As A Dragon Girl With A System" [1]. The quality of writing is better with this one and the story feels quite a bit more colourful.
Don't worry, no real spoilers ahead.
The first one that I mentioned is very dark, it's about a man that's practicing cultivation in a sect where they put a thing similar to a leech or a worm into your heart which is constantly eating your blood and your blood qi, meaning if you're not eating enough the worm thingy with kill you, but if you are feeding yourself and thus the worm. The worm will grow and release purified qi which will allow you to get to a higher level of cultivation, but that will also make the worm stronger, thus eating more. So it's really a world of struggle it's either eat or be eaten.
As for the second story, it's about a girl who's parents were killed when she was like 6 years old and because she didn't have anyone else she had to live on the streets, seeing more bricks than trees (quote from the story). One day she was digging through a dumpster when she was attacked by another homeless person, because she was scavenging in his territory, this resulted in her death, as she was dying she cursed all humans saying that they're all rotten to the core and hoping that if she ever reincarnates she would be anything but a human, even a bug would be better... Thus she's reborn as a very cute red dragon baby. ^^
No amount of technology will ever surpass actual human connection until our forebrains permanently melt away. At the end of the day we are constantly trying to "connect better" when the answer is, unironically, to simply go outside.
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It is high time that some one with authority announced that reading is not the summum bonum of life. The very act of reading is unsocial. It is a kind of melancholy barbarism. If you look
The Lost Art of Conversation
IT IS high time that some one in authority announced that reading is not the summum bonum of life. The very act of reading is unsocial. It is a kind of melancholy barbarism. If you look about you in a railway train, in a street car or ‘bus you will observe that every one is reading–men, women, and even the innocent little children. Silent, glum, their eyes glued to book or paper, they sit there, like so many savages brooding in a jungle. Where are the jolly conversations that Washington Irving and Dickens overheard in the stage-coaches of the long ago? Where is the cheery sociability that once made traveling a liberal education?
Conversation is in the way of becoming a lost art – like the making of mummies and the laying of the great auk's egg. We have such a precious deal of reading to do that conversation is out of the question. We have no time to talk. We have no leisure for comparing ideas as to the weather. It is not impossible to imagine a day when “How late the spring is!” and “Doesn't it look like rain?” will be quite obsolete. We are reading ourselves into a silent race. When we stay at home we read; we travel to read. In lonely forests, on far-away mountain peaks, aship, ashore, our generation wanders – and reads. At this very moment some one is reading in the desert of the Sahara and another is reading as he treks the African veldt, and Andre himself is ice-bound near the Pole, reading.
Before long monastic institutions for the undisturbed pursuit of reading will doubtless arise all over the land. Reading is the superstition of the day. The amount of printed matter we have read is accounted to us for a sort of righteousness. I stopped to watch some boys playing baseball the other day. There was a duffer at the bat, and the little left-fielder pulled a paper from his hip pocket and began to read. General Shafter, it is averred, lay in a hammock and directed the battle, at odd moments dipping his nose into the newspapers.
Conversation is decaying and we are degenerating into unsocial silence. This is not a negligible danger. Man's chief duty – his unending duty – the proper aim of life is to talk. Soldiers fight, statesmen plan, artists paint, poets rhyme merely that they may talk and be talked about. Men live nobly in order to have fine topics of conversation. Books are written not so much to be read as to be talked over.
The decay of conversation is a ready-made subject for the critically minded man. The divergence between the written and spoken language is growing wider every day. We talk in a sort of telegraphic slang. No sane man would think of introducing into his conversation the phrases and words of the written language. Very little of the spoken language gets into print. In the end the books will beat the tongues. Already we exchange ideas with printed pages not with our fellow-men- and I foresee the dismal day when even our present emasculated conversation will be superfluous. We shall read our way in silence from the cradle to the grave.
VANCE THOMPSON.
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Or as a more readable article with its own page https://www.darkread.io/C3tZZJUGZ-HD
If only!
I wonder though, if the same thing was said for email and instant messaging when it was first popularized.
But there are still plenty of book clubs, I was in one for years, and I read a lot of books and talked about them. Books I wouldn’t have picked in a thousand years but were none the less fascinating, and easier to finish what with the group effort.
I'm glad to see that the spoken tongue is holding up well against, if not dictating, the written language.
The art of conversation is unknown to many. I attempt to explain to others that conversation is a volley - not a match. Serve up softballs, allow others to answer questions, and then return the favor by asking a question.
Conversations with the iPad generation are almost worthless. Conversations with strangers are often fruitless. I am silent for the most part because people cannot speak in a manner that would suggest they have any interest outside of their own pleasures.
I’ve made a priority of improving the way in which I communicate the last few years, and think I’ve made genuine progress. Stuff like actively listening, avoiding interruption, making peace with someone explaining something I already understand, etc…
But after all this, I’ve come to realize that I wasn’t as relatively bad at conversation as I thought I was when I started. So many of my peers struggle with this. There is so much showing others this thing or that, always asymmetrically. There is a pervasive fear of wasting the other persons’ time - I think this has to do with us growing up with instant dopamine available in our palms. There is so much anxiety in communication. There is a fear of being wrong, or a fear of speaking without trivial qualification. And most importantly: there is a failure to understand the effort required to listen well.
This is just my experience, and my own analysis as it relates to my life. I’m aware that it comes across as cynical, but thought it might be worth sharing here. We need to get our attention back, and see the value (without forcing) of relating to others.
It makes the gems stand out even more, but I wish the art of conversation was something people actively considered when they thought about their own personality, or when they examined their anxieties.
And yeah, developing the ability to listen to what people are saying without getting overwhelmed by/your internal stream of thoughts makes listening a lot more interesting and more useful. Much misunderstanding can be avoided and many interesting things to ask about are only subtly hinted at the first time.
This really resonated with me. Thank you
So not only do us 'users' become products, but we are rewarded for selling ourselves.
Too much time it devolves on vague if not fluff talk where people are more focused on liability rather than honesty, fun, joy or thinking.
Even with best efforts in seeking shared fun the stats are too low.
You have to find people who don't give a fuck. They're way more fun to talk to.
I've also come to feel, though, that conversation is not at all a human instinct. It's a skill to be honed like any other, but it isn't clearly valued on our society. Guitar, painting, writing blog posts, or any other skill which can be used as a personal medium of expression are almost completely cut out from the education system in favor of only presenting common core topics which are mostly inapplicable and unhelpful to the average citizen.
Humans want to express themselves, but I feel as though we're rapidly running out of unique ways to do so - or at least, ways that feel unique in a world of billions. When people are talking about "stuff they like," I feel as though it's a symptom of them not having the skills that they need to express their humanity, and to understand your own. It's not even really their fault... no one taught them, they just haven't figured it out on their own yet.
When there's no guarantee that humans kicked out into the world at 18 will have any idea of how to relate to other people's human experiences... how can you expect them to be any good at conversing with you? All we have is our soul anyway, as Socrates once taught us, so we each stand to benefit from knowing how to talk about it.
If you feel like you're too good at [the guitar] for your [band], bail. If you'd feel even better enabling them for a lifetime to express themselves better through [music], then pour your heart into teaching them. But there are many other people out there who are very, very skilled at [making music], and if [making great music] is a true driving force for you, then you have to go and seek it out.
Mix and match the words in the brackets for advice on any skill you can only practice with other people, especially conversation :3
That's my experience and philosophy at least, and I think it's really been helping me through some agonizing feelings as of late. I'm sorry that you've had such frustrating experiences just trying to relate to people, I know the feeling and it's totally soul-sucking.
And as far as people your own age, perhaps you are encountering the sad truth that most of adult interaction is not like collegiate exploration of reality, nor even the semi good natured posturing of high school, but the out and out war of junior high school.
Seek out small groups with interesting concerns and you can find open, inquisitive minds.
Also, those dumb strangers, probably they all have at least one interesting story in them, try a strategy of adjusting your words to make what you wish to find more probably. It won’t always work, but enough to make public transit a fun way to get around.
They are the laziest form of communication on earth.
It's a reply without having to think of anything to further the conversation.
People mark an emoji and then keep scrolling feeling good about themselves.
I'm not saying it's superior, but I appreciate the nuance's it can bring to online dialog where otherwise many misinterpretations are likely to happen
I've seen another kind of conversation, in a crowd, where the aim is to keep the attention upon yourself.
On social media I sometimes say pointy things to attract a conversation. Is that similar? Maybe.
I have a couple favorite subjects that I find almost impossible to get conversations about.