The Art of a Lively Conversation

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The questions certainly sound surprising, even shocking. We’d almost never dare to bring up such matters with a stranger. Instead, we’d tiptoe delicately around neutral topics found in the media while ignoring the fact that most of us are really looking for an exchange of vulnerable material. So afraid are we of sounding odd, that we instead too readily accept boredom.

We should be braver. An evening comes alive when we meet people who express our very own thoughts, but with a clarity and psychological accuracy we could not match. They know us better than we know ourselves. What was shy and confused within us is unapologetically and cogently phrased in them, our pleasure at the meeting indicating that we have found a piece of ourselves, a sentence or two built of the very substance of which our own minds are made. The dinner party companion has located words to depict a situation we thought ourselves alone in feeling, and for a few moments, we are like two lovers on an early dinner date thrilled to discover how much they share (and so unable to do more than graze at the food in front of them).

We should be more demanding of our social lives. Rather than seeing a successful encounter as a rare gift, we should expect to engineer one regularly. The history of conversation suggests that it’s when there are heavy-handed rules around that our spirit can best be set free. We might be tempted to giggle at the artificiality of a conversation menu or the pretentiousness of Madame de Condorcet’s dinner parties—and yet we should welcome them for helping us get to the elusive, spontaneous, and sincere bits of ourselves.

Alain de Botton’s newest book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, will be published in June. Excerpted from Standpoint(Nov. 2008), a London-based magazine that celebrates the arts and values of our civilization; www.standpointmag.co.uk.

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