The Art of a Lively Conversation

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So what can be done to help liberate us? We need to learn some manners. The suggestion could sound archaic. There’s a well-worn tradition of mocking the fancy dinner party. Yet history shows that conversations grow interesting and sincere precisely when people accept a little artificiality in the proceedings. Consider the record of the greatest conversation in the Western tradition, Plato’s Symposium. The evening is as minutely choreographed as a piece of theater. A group of intellectual Athenians takes it in turn to deliver discourses on the nature of love while eating a banquet featuring olives and seafood. A close eye is kept on the clock. People avoid unnecessary digressions. There is no mention of the weather. The hosts are keen to give their guests the greatest of dinner-party gifts: some ideas to take home with them.

It was to the ancient Greeks that the French aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie looked when they began to hold their famous salons in 18th-century Paris. Fed up with the idle chatter of the court at Versailles, where the talk centered relentlessly on who had shot what and in which forest, they wanted to make their homes into the spiritual descendants of Socrates’ dining room. One of the greatest hostesses of the period, Sophie de Condorcet, wrote down a touching set of rules for a successful evening. Guests had to arrive with a number of conversational topics and explore them with the same rigor as a scholar in a library, except that rather than consulting books, the other guests were to provide the insights. Examples of fitting topics included: What is the wisest way to approach one’s own death? Can governments make us good or only obedient?

The topics might not precisely fit the agenda of early-21st-century men and women, but the logic behind Madame de Condorcet’s approach—namely, that we need to plan a little in order to have a good conversation—is still valid. A few years back the academic Theodore Zeldin tried to raise the art of conversation in our own times when he began a series of public meals in Oxford. Groups of strangers came together and agreed to lay aside their inhibitions and explore ideas, regrets, and aspirations. Zeldin provided a conversation menu with questions like these: Which of my ambitions is likely to remain unfulfilled? Is sex overrated?

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