From Word To Word

Most people no longer converse.  At least, they no longer converse well.

They chat well, certainly, about the weather, about their favourite sports teams, about the newest entertainment news, about anything that will not reveal or involve them personally.  Otherwise, they say very little, and when circumstances require them to go further than mere chatter, require them to say something meaningful about what they think, feel, and believe, they lack the practice, the experience, the tools, to say anything very coherent. Even those few who are willing to go beyond their chatter often fall short of real conversation as well, falling into mere argumentation, into alternating monologue, into self-absorbed verbiage.

Conversation, however, true conversation, is much more than mere chatter or argument.  It is an exchange of words that is like an exchange of gifts.  Those who converse approach each other ready to give and receive words as tokens of themselves, as tokens of their love for one another.  They approach and receive each other as an act of hospitality, as an act of friendship, and their words are the gestures, the icons, the sacraments of this exchange.  They give and receive themselves through their words, though this giving and receiving is nothing that they can determine or guarantee.

Conversation is never satisfied with idle chatter, even if it permits this kind of talk to take place and to perform its function.  It does not do away with chatter, but neither is it satisfied with it, because conversation always desires something more, always desires to know the other more deeply in hospitality, in friendship, in love.

Neither is conversation ever satisfied with argument, even if this argument takes up questions of the profoundest significance, because conversation desires that words be exchanged like gifts, not that assent be compelled by force.  Though conversation is open to disagreement, open to difference in thought and feeling and belief, it exchanges even this difference, especially this difference, within its economy of giving and hospitality and friendship.  Difference, through the exchange of conversation, is made to strengthen rather than weaken the relation that is formed through the exchange of words.

Conversation is only satisfied, then, with words that give ourselves and receive others, with words that perform a continual hospitality, with words that are nothing except as they come to form a relation between us.

This is why a conversation does not end when a particular subject becomes exhausted, because the subject is secondary to the relation in any case.  The conversation extends beyond any subject, beyond any occasion, even if the subject and the occasion inform it profoundly.  The conversation  extends also beyond any greeting and farewell, waiting always to be continued, extending itself across whole lives, passing from generation to generation.

This kind of conversation does not come without labour, however.  Like anything worth doing, it must be cultivated.  We must seek it out wherever it might be, give ourselves over to it when it is found, guard it against thoose things that would threaten it, because it is perhaps our  profoundest human treasure.