Theodore Zeldin (http://www.oxfordmuse.com/) on Dr Johnson from An Intimate History of Humanity:
“But talk was the dust-cloud which he blew around him to conceal the terrors, evil and gloom which constantly haunted him, and which he considered to be the very essence of life, to the point that he got angry with anyone who denied that life was necessarily unhappy. Combating such thoughts was pointless, he insisted, one could only divert them, by directing one’s mind to other topics; so that he envied women who knitted and knotted, and indeed tried to learn knotting and music in vain. Talk was his supreme pleasure because it provided him with relief, but his talk was not genuine conversation, it was not exchange. His talent was for uttering opinions perfectly formed, in him, because he believed that it needed to be ended by one of the parties emerging victorious and he battled ferociously to ensure that he always won himself. He never discovered the value of being contradicted. People admired him because he could sum up a problem in an epigram, but the effect was to end a conversation, not to start it. His sententious judgements - for example, that ‘when a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford’, or that the ‘French are gross, ill-bred, untaught people’ - belie his more interesting statement that ‘I look upon every day to be lost in which I do not make a new a new acquaintance.’
To answer your question, it is aspects of conversation that lie closer to that final statement, with its implicit expression of feeling, that I wish could be aired just occasionally.
I tend to find that telling people even such a hint of what one might feel serves soley to give them amunition against you. And thusly I chose to tell such things only to people who I either am happy to use it against me or trust that they won't. That is a vanishingly small set compared to 'people I talk to in the pub'.
If I can take the topic of ammunition and use a geeky metaphor ;)
I don't like the Minbari way of showing trust, approaching with gun ports open so people can see their weapons and that they are not using them therefore they can be trusted.
I prefer, after a while, the equivalent to giving someone the initiation code to your self-destruct sequence, then if they use it you know you can't trust them. Of course, you don't have to be giving them your real self-destruct code...
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ewx
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-11 02:07 pm (UTC)No - not the deep dark secrets...
Date: 2007-01-11 04:16 pm (UTC)“But talk was the dust-cloud which he blew around him to conceal the terrors, evil and gloom which constantly haunted him, and which he considered to be the very essence of life, to the point that he got angry with anyone who denied that life was necessarily unhappy. Combating such thoughts was pointless, he insisted, one could only divert them, by directing one’s mind to other topics; so that he envied women who knitted and knotted, and indeed tried to learn knotting and music in vain. Talk was his supreme pleasure because it provided him with relief, but his talk was not genuine conversation, it was not exchange. His talent was for uttering opinions perfectly formed, in him, because he believed that it needed to be ended by one of the parties emerging victorious and he battled ferociously to ensure that he always won himself. He never discovered the value of being contradicted. People admired him because he could sum up a problem in an epigram, but the effect was to end a conversation, not to start it. His sententious judgements - for example, that ‘when a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that life can afford’, or that the ‘French are gross, ill-bred, untaught people’ - belie his more interesting statement that ‘I look upon every day to be lost in which I do not make a new a new acquaintance.’
To answer your question, it is aspects of conversation that lie closer to that final statement, with its implicit expression of feeling, that I wish could be aired just occasionally.
Re: No - not the deep dark secrets...
Date: 2007-01-11 04:19 pm (UTC)Re: No - not the deep dark secrets...
Date: 2007-01-11 05:10 pm (UTC)Re: No - not the deep dark secrets...
Date: 2007-01-11 05:51 pm (UTC)I don't like the Minbari way of showing trust, approaching with gun ports open so people can see their weapons and that they are not using them therefore they can be trusted.
I prefer, after a while, the equivalent to giving someone the initiation code to your self-destruct sequence, then if they use it you know you can't trust them. Of course, you don't have to be giving them your real self-destruct code...