Someday I'm going to have to retire, leaving the university that has been my
home for nearly twenty years now. And when I do, what I'm going to miss,
more than anything else, is the conversation. One thing about
academics--their stock in trade is talking. They read a lot, they know a
lot, and they think for a living. And they love to tell you all about
it--they are born explainers of the complicated.
This is refreshing. Most of us live within an impoverished conversational
landscape. Women talking with other women talk mostly about children,
relationships, and what dorks men are. Men in conversation with other men,
I am told, talk mostly about sports and cars and their jobs, and what dorks
politicians are.
But at a university, your table at lunch might include an art professor, a
priest, a historian, the theater lighting director, a librarian and a
vice-president for something or other. You name a topic--they aren't going
to agree on it; they all know different things about it. You mention
Bosnia, and the feminist talks about rape as an instrument of suppression;
the art professor speaks with immense sadness about the architectural
treasures destroyed in the bombardment of Sarajevo; the historian tells you
about the 700 years of conflict between the ethnic groups; the political
scientist tells you how the politicians spent years reminding Serbs and
Croats and Muslims how much they hated each other; the professor who spent a
year in a cultural exchange program teaching in Yugoslavia tells you about
what it was like to live among the escalating tensions.
A really good conversation works like Dixieland jazz. Someone states a
theme, and all the different instruments take turns picking up the theme and
playing around with it. No two statements of the theme are alike, because
some of us are saxophones or tubas or flutes, and some of us are rhythm
instruments. We all have our little set pieces, but we listen to each
other, changing our performance to respond to how the other musicians have
played it. Like Dixieland, the performers are having even more fun than the
audience. It's a wonderfully generative act, that makes us all articulate
ideas we had no idea we thought; when a conversation is really rolling, it
can be as satisfying, in its own way, as sex.
But if a large group conversation generates ideas, it doesn't do much to
help you explore them. Conversation is, after all, a social act, with
social agreements--like the rule that everybody gets a turn. Typically, it
will float from idea to idea, each one briefly developed then dropped.
Someone who insists on working an idea through all its dimensions is a
social boor.
It's like the dixieland band got taken over by a tuba player
who thinks this lovely piece of music is really a tuba concerto--other
performers can supply the bass line, but he gets to carry the theme, do
all the variations, and show off like crazy on the cadenzas. The music is
now all about him rather than us.
So you come back after a really good group conversation filled with
partially developed ideas. It just takes a different kind of conversation
to explore those ideas, test them for truthfulness, examine their
usefulness, place them in context with what we already know.
This kind of testing of ideas is not as common as you might think.
When higher education is the ticket of admission to the middle class, you
get an awful lot of students who treat education like chickenpox--you go
where it is, you catch it, and, maybe, you're immune to it for the rest of
your life. They sit in the front row, write down everything the teacher
says, and remember it just long enough to spew it back on an exam. But the
genuinely educated people are the ones who listen to the words, and say:
"Yes! Because, this, this, this, this and this." And they list the
supporting evidence they found in their own knowledge and experience. Or
they say "That's a pile! Because, this, this, this, this and this."
Or better yet, they say, "That's interesting. I wonder if that has
anything to do with this?" As they make connections in their mind
between what they know already and what they learn, they make the knowledge
different, and they make it profoundly their own.
and this kind of thinking requires a different kind of conversation. Maybe
with just one other person who also wants to explore that idea, someone who
will challenge your ideas, and supply different perspectives and information
(like my economist son who keeps dragging statistics and the real world in
to spoil some of my loveliest ideas). Or maybe just a conversation with
yourself.
And the best tool for a conversation with yourself is writing. When you put
a thought down in print, it has the decency to stay put on the page and let
you examine it at length. Does it make sense? Are the ideas in logical
order? Does it square with your understanding and knowledge of the world?
Is it a useful idea, that is, will it help you deal with your life and your
problems? Conversation is to writing as Dixieland is to a string quartet.
This is why I love having this column to write. Over the years I have toyed
with a whole lot of ideas. I've had all these one and two paragraph ideas
that I never really explored at any length. The column forces me to finish
the thinking process that all those wonderful conversations started. And
though I may sometimes sound very definite, not to say opinionated, my
columns are still me in the middle of a process of exploration. When my
readers write and argue with me, they force me either to do a better job of
explaining my opinion, or they help me change it.
In theory, of course, there's no reason why I couldn't have been writing all
along. But if there's nobody to read it, you don't bother. If there's no
deadline to meet, it's just another one of those things you're going to get
around to someday (like someday I'm going to organize all my son's pictures
and art works and report cards).
So I'm very grateful. To my university, for providing the Dixieland. And
to the London Mall, for making me turn it into chamber music. Not somber,
profound, Beethoven-type chamber music. What I do is definitely wind
ensemble--a little frothy, a bit frivolous, but still structured to be
listened to from start to finish.
Previous Columns: Computer Shy, Ad Lib, Practical Cat Names, Son of Flower Children, Flower Children, Me and a Book, Never Middle Aged, Legal Speech, Stupid Speech, To Find or Not To Find, We Will Rock You, America in 9 Innings, Thank The Ludd, Target Market, Naming Names, Something Amyth , In Praise of Men, Small Truths , White Whine, Draft Dodger, Tar Baby, Sensible Lizards, Debut, Week 2, Hard Copy, Word Child, Every Other Inch A Lady, Naming of Books, Progress, maybe (sort of...), All Reasons Great & Small, On achieving perfect copy, OJ (On Justice), Waiting for Webster's, What Genes Have Wrought, Light Out, Staying on the Map, Don't just stand there..., Remotely Funny, No Government Day, Advice For Desperate Men, Why Kids
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