The yearning to explore

I don’t want to teach you how to do conversation well.

I have long been the sort of person who likes to explore every detail, and who attempts to create the complete and accurate map. That will not be my contribution to the art of conversation. Rather, I wish to inspire others to see conversation as a beautiful art, worthy of their own creativity and exploration.

I don’t want to teach you how to do conversation well. I want you to yearn to do it well.

To assert that there is some such systematic analysis of conversation possible is to assert that it is an Art—a practical science like the art of reasoning called Logic, or the art of eloquence called Rhetoric. Now this runs counter to one of the strongest convictions of all intelligent men and women, that if anything in the world ought to be spontaneous it is conversation. How can a thing be defined by rules which consists in following the chances of the moment, drifting with the temper of the company, suiting the discourse to whatever subject may turn up? The instant any one is felt to be talking by rules all the charm of his society vanishes, and the becomes the worst of social culprits—a bore. For it is the natural easy flow of talk which is indeed the perfection of what we seek. Didactic teaching, humorous anecdotes, clever argument—these may take their part in social intercourse, but they are not its perfection. To take up what others say in easy comment, to give in return, something which will please, to stimulate the silent and the morose out of their vapours and surprise them into good humour, to lead while one seems to follow—this is the real aim of good conversation. How can such a Protean impalpable acquirement be in any way an art depending on rules? Does it not altogether depend on natural gifts, or a ready power of expression, on a sanguine temperament, on a quick power of sympathy, on a placed temper? Is there not a wish, nay a certainty, that in dissecting it we shall slay its life and destroy its beauty?

However natural and reasonable this objection, it is based on the mistake that art is opposed to nature, that natural means merely what is spontaneous and unprepared, and artistic what is manifestly studied and artificial. This is one of the commonest and most widely-spread popular errors.

~ J. P. Mahaffy §2, The Principles of the Art of Conversation

Each person we meet is an opportunity to learn and to be inspired. Each knows something we do not.

Where will your imagination lead you?

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