Power Outage

If there is a core insight in the podcast boomlet, it may be that, as much as we enjoy tweeting, texting, watching, writing, reading, and snapping, no Internet-born form has supplanted the potency of conversation.

The other day there was a power outage in my neighborhood. While we had electricity, there was no internet and no television. I was beside myself. It was impossible to get online or watch Wolf Blitzer’s latest “Breaking News” report.

Once again I was reminded how much we, or at least, I have come to depend on our technology rich world. I don’t mind being alone with my thoughts or sitting quietly staring into space. But now and then I do like to check into the world.

I began thinking of what I used to do before the arrival of the internet or television. Well, I read a book, magazine or newspaper. And I still do that. So I opened my iPad and began reading what I had already downloaded and then I turned to the printed book I was reading then.

The power outage reminded me of what Haruki Murakami wrote about life before and after the development of the electronic revolution in his story “Town of Cats,” published in The New Yorker.

By setting the story in 1984, before cell phones and e-mail and the Internet had become common, I made it impossible for my characters to use such tools. This in turn was frustrating for me. I felt their absence slowing down the speed of the novel. When I thought about it, though, not having such devices at the time—both in daily life and in the story—ceased to be an inconvenience. If you wanted to make a phone call, you just found a public telephone; if you had to look something up, you went to the library; if you wanted to contact somebody, you put a stamp on a letter and mailed it. Those were the normal ways to do those things. While writing the novel (and experiencing a kind of time slip), I had a strong feeling of what the intervening twenty-seven years had meant. Sorry to state the obvious, but maybe there’s not much connection between the convenience of people’s surroundings and the degree of happiness they feel.

I would have enjoyed talking to someone, but no one was around for most of the day. Indeed it would have been an unusual day to have a real conversation without the interminable distractions that occupy so much of our life now.

On his blog, Anecdotal Evidence, Patrick Kurp describes how he once spent a day in conversation. “For the first time in a long time I spent most of my waking hours on Saturday in conversation.” This was not your ordinary hello-goodbye talk, but rather a serious exchange of ideas about literature.

It was a give and take of “memories, thoughts and stories” as he describes it. It wasn’t a monologue or the least bit strident. In the morning he spent two hours with a teacher he had 46 years ago. He says she was as sharp as she was when he took an English class with her in high school. They talked about “books, old friends and the ongoing decline of Western Civilization.”

In the afternoon he spent more than seven hours talking with a couple, both artists, who have been his friends for 41 years. “The talk was effortless and never stopped.”

After describing the day he turns to Boswell who reports “the great man" [Samuel Johnson] saying, “The happiest conversation is that of which nothing is distinctly remembered but a general effect of pleasing impression.”

When was the last time you spent a day like this? When was the last time you had conversations like this?

Conversations With My Gardener

I remember once…I met this woman…She was an Indian woman. Older than I was. And it was there…we knew each other at once. You have to trust this kind of thing. …It has nothing to do with age, or sex, or color, or anything of that sort. Doris Lessing

When was the last time you had a genuine conversation with someone, rather like a dialogue where one person poses a question or makes a statement and the other replies in kind and it continues on this way until you run out of steam?

A few days ago I had a chance to see Conversations with My Gardener once again. How could I resist? The beauty of the French countryside, in this case the area around Rhone Alps, close to the Swiss border in southern France, drew me to the film the first time. I also went to see the no less special nature of the friendship between the Parisian painter and the gardener he hires to bring back to life the vegetable garden at his country estate.

This time I saw something different, namely the character of the conversations between the two men, each from a different class, educational experience, and life’s work. What was the source of the deep rapport between these two dissimilar men? How were they able to find so much to talk about, from the mundane to the reflective, with such pleasure? Was there any distinctive feature of what they said or how they it that created such a perfect blending?

As I viewed the film once again and thought further about it, I realized it was their total honesty in disclosing themselves, in bringing their own experiences to each other. Each of them in turn followed with something about their own life. They listened to one another. They heard one another. And they responded to what was said.

How rare is that, how often does it occur to you? You have to let down your guard and hope that it will be appreciated and reciprocated. You never know if that will happen. But it’s a good way to start, if that kind of exchange means anything to you.

It isn’t associated with men or women; it can occur with the young and the old. There is nothing sexual about it. That would only ruin it, although there is an element of intimacy connected with it. It happens immediately and is thoroughly exhilarating.

One night several years ago, I had dinner with a librarian. She was about to head out of town to play poker in Las Vegas. Yes a poker playing librarian; they seem to come in all varieties now. Naturally, the juxtaposition of librarian and poker player fascinated me. (The Secret Lives of Librarians, a Times Notable Book of the Year.)

Anyway, we talked as one does when having dinner with a librarian, especially, a poker playing one. I tried to find out what it is about poker than meant so much to her. She replied, “I am most myself when I am playing poker.”

It is a phrase I sometimes use about myself in some situations, but not while playing poker which is not among my current activities, although now that I know a local librarian, it might become one. After our rendezvous, I began to think further about when individuals are most themselves.

I began by looking more closely at the concept. What does it mean to say you are most yourself? The phrase implies that each person has a central core, one that is in some way set apart from the other self or selves that we usually display. The oracle admonished us to “Know thyself.” What is this self that the oracle is referring to?

I think the Graham [Greene] was not simply “made up of two persons.” Rather, that he gave rein to disparate states of mind as they successively possessed him, putting these to service in his work…with years, however, it had come to prevail for its own sake as a mood of defiance, directed against the tedium of rational existence. Shirley Hazzard Greene on Capri

The conversation between the painter and gardener was something like that, two persons who realized when they met that they had been childhood friends, each expressing the way they felt at this time in their life--the painter struggling with a separation from his wife, the gardener enjoying his time in the garden, as he was succumbing to an illness.

Both men becoming increasing attached to one another, the pleasure of their friendship and the opportunity to display it and help one another. They were different people at other times and situations, the painter a sophisticated art critic, the gardener a railway company laborer. Don’t we all carry around another self or several, rather than one?

"The Purest Form of Eros"

A few years ago a group of social psychologists posed the following question in an article on conversational styles. “What is the source of the ineffable “chemistry” that some couples enjoy? The question is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating because of its richness and complexity; frustrating because it has defied simple answers. Indeed, precisely why members of some couples get along better than do others has, for the most part, remained cloaked in mystery.”

This is a question that has longed been an interest of mine. In their latest book, Click: The Magic of Instant Connections, Ori and Rom Brafman try to unravel the mystery of this phenomenon. They begin with what is clearly well known to anyone who has experienced this “almost euphoric state.”

Clicking can be defined as an immediate, deep, and meaningful connection with another person or with the world around us…we immediately sense that we can just be ourselves around that person. Things feel right: we hit if off.

Only a very few times in my life have I felt this way. Once it occurs, I think you are changed forever. The experience sets a standard against which you tend to measure all your future relationships. There is a responsiveness to each other that is rarely found with other individuals. You can say something to one person and nothing happens. When you say the very same thing to a person you click with, there is an immediate understanding, an even faster reply, which in turn, gets another and the cycle continues until you both need to stop to take a breath.

“You’re so clever, sometimes, with words, and I’m every so clever when I’m talking to you….You’re appreciative of my cleverness, you laughed at my jokes, you make related jokes back, implying that you’ve heard and actually LISTENED to what I said.”

After discussing a range of conditions in which clicking occurs, Brafman and Brafman describe “five click accelerators—ingredients or factors involved in a click—that show up time and time across different contexts."

The first is the power of vulnerability, the willingness “to disclose to others the kind of person you are, to drop your protective armor....” An example is the way shared adversity can become a key factor in bringing people together.

Proximity is the second accelerator that can make a big difference. This is not the least bit surprising. The likelihood of clicking with someone in Montevideo if you live in Omaha is pretty close to zero.

Similarity is said to be an accelerator. That is also fairly obvious, although far from a necessary condition, as two people with widely different interests often get along just fine.

In 1979 Woody Allen met Mia Farrow and they stayed together for many years. Yet Woody once said. "I could go on about our differences forever: She doesn't like the city and I adore it. She loves the country and I don't like it. She doesn't like sports at all and I love sports. She loves to eat in, early -- 5:30, 6 -- and I love to eat out, late… She can't sleep with an air-conditioner on; I can only sleep with an air-conditioner on. She loves pets and animals; I hate pets and animals. … She would love to take a boat down the Amazon or go up to Mount Kilimanjaro; I never want to go near those places… She has raised nine children now with no trauma and has never owned a thermometer. I take my temperature every two hours in the course of the day."

The Brafmans identify the environment as the fourth click accelerator. Here they speak of shared communities working together for a common goal or to overcome adversity. They mention soldiers who become lifelong friends after fighting together, individuals who lived together on a kibbutz or individuals who worked together in the same office for years.

Finally they say certain personalities simply seem to click more readily. They come almost preset with an open and levity spirit. This, in turn, can often lead the other person to respond in the same way.

Have the Brafman brothers contributed to our understanding of the mystery of connecting with another person? To be sure they have described various components of the relationship and they have done so by discussing a good deal of current empirical research. I view their analysis as identifying some of the key predictors of clicking.

But even when all these factors are present, there is no guarantee the other person will be on the same wavelength. We can disclose all we want but that may only lead someone else to clam up. Similarly, neither similarity nor proximity seems to me necessary for these kinds of relationships to develop. Nor does a sparkling personality absent a shared temperament.

The mystery remains. Of all of the factors the Brafmans identify the one that seems to have the most practical value is disclosing personal details of your life, what they call “the power of vulnerability.” But this is a very tricky matter, as well as a bit manipulative. More likely, that “ineffable chemistry” simply happens or it doesn’t, the gears will mesh unpredictably, uncontrollably perhaps once or twice in a lifetime—if you are lucky. Let it be. No matter your age, your current relationships, your joys or heartbreaks, you’ll recognize it instantly.

Conversations With My Gardener

I write to tell you about a beautiful film I saw on the weekend. In most cases reading or viewing something beautiful is not something I feel like keeping private. Conversations with My Gardener is a French film about a Parisian artist who hires a gardener to bring back to life the overgrown garden at his family’s rundown manor in the country.

The beauty of this film is not only in its visual images, but also in its depiction of the friendship, devotion, and philosophies of the two men. To see the film is close to being in France, in the countryside during the summer: flowers, and vegetables, a dog running after a motorbike, charming people speaking amusingly in French, a language as beautiful than the scenery.

There is a good deal of talk between the painter and the gardener who turn out to be old childhood school friends. Each has gone their own way, one to the Parisian art and café world, the other to a blue-collar life on railroad work crews

Their friendship is renewed and deepens as the seasons pass. They exchange views about the profound and the trivial—paintings, lovers, marriage music, careers, fishing and illness. It is wonderful to watch these two men speaking and jesting with one another for a couple of hours on the screen.

The gardener tells the painter that the important things are those you keep in your heart. He tells him to always carry a knife and a piece of string—advice that turns out to be helpful in a future scene. The painter takes the gardener to the Louvre and tells him about light and dark and what he is thinking while he paints.

A reviewer comments: There’s a great sense of place. We luxuriate in the verdant peace of Rhone-Alpes’ picturesque Villefranche-sur-Saone, and the eternal city of Paris, through the cobbled streets, the sidewalk cafes and the Arc de Triomphe…There are many images of conversation that are memorable, but none more so than that of the two men fishing, deliberating on matters of life and death. Philosophical, mischievous and melancholy, this is a beautiful film that draws us to the two characters, their lives and hearts.

If you enjoy this sort of thing, try to view the film if it comes your way. Here is a clip of what you will see.

Wordplay

Some people enjoy saying things they don’t quite mean. I am one of them. On a really stormy day, I will often look outside and say something like, “What a beautiful day it is.” I am not lying or trying to mislead anyone. Rather, saying the opposite of what I really mean or what is obviously untrue is how I sometimes like to talk. It is a form of irony, an exaggerated form of irony, and speaking that way often has more than one meaning. It is also a very tricky matter.

I might say something like I really enjoy Thai food, when it fact I don’t like it at all. And if you are the recipient of this statement, you are suppose to pick up on it and know that I am really telling you how much I dislike Thai food. As you can see, this can sometimes be misinterpreted.

But when you know someone who catches on at once, and this is usually a person who knows you very well, she might reply in kind. She will say something like “Yes, let’s go to this new Thai restaurant,” when in fact, she doesn’t mean that at all and you are fully aware she doesn’t. What she means is that going to a Thai restaurant is out of the question, that, of course we will go to our favorite French bistro.

Apparently, this way of communicating is rather common for those who speak Farsi. In an interview in the Times a few years ago, the Iranian novelist, Dalia Sofer, described the elusiveness and indirect way of speaking in Farsi.

There’s this whole idea of taarof—you say something you don’t mean, and the other person is supposed to pick up on it. For example, if I am visiting you, I may say, “It is getting late; I must go, and you say, “No, please stay,” and I am supposed to know that you really want me to go. People have to pick up on codes.

By no means is this restricted to those who speak Farsi. The American writer Amy Bloom is a master of this writing technique. (Maybe she speaks this way too.) In her latest collection of short stories, Where the God of Loves Hangs Out, the couple depicted in the first quartet of stories often speaks that way to one another.

Clare and William, who are having an affair, are about to have dinner. William has the gout so must eat mild foods. Clare goes out to the kitchen to make something for the two of them.

She “…gathers up everything that wasn’t eaten at lunch and every promising plastic container, including a little olive tapenade and a lot of pineapple cottage cheese, and lays it all on the coffee table in front of William with a couple of forks and two napkins.”

“You do go all out,” he says.

“I don’t know how Isabel [William’s wife] caters to you the way she does. If Charles [Clare’s husband] were as much of a baby as you, I’d get a nurse and check into a hotel.”

“I’m sure you would.”

And later, they are sitting together on a sofa where, because of his gout, William has to spend much of each day.

“A lot of activity here,” Clare says.

“Oh, yes quite a ruckus, “William says.

Here is one more:

“All right,” William said. “Let’s have it. You’re shipwrecked on a desert island. Who do you want to be with—me or Nelson Slater?” [a young kid in the neighborhood]

“Oh my God,” Clare says. “Nelson. Of course.”

“Good choice. He did a great job with the firewood.”

All this can be very amusing, of course, both for Clare and William and for the reader, at least a reader who takes a liking to this way of communicating.

It can also be equally amusing if you like to speak that way to someone once in a while. Knowing someone who also enjoys bantering with you in this way and who can easily catch on to your way of speaking is simply one of the great joys in life. It lends an edge to communicating, a little mystery too and it can often lead to sparkling conversations and crazy ideas that are sometimes not quite so crazy after all.

Talking to Yourself

I spend a good part of the day talking to myself--silently, of course. I ask myself questions, try to answer them, and mull over one thing or another. Doesn’t everybody do this?

Some of my best ideas emerge during these conversations. At the end of each day, I head out for a walk along a canal near my place and let my thoughts wander--my day, what I might do next, whatever pops into my mind. I usually find this an especially productive time.

On his blog Just Seven Things, Si Conroy writes about the way talking to yourself can be a very intelligent thing to do:

“By talking to yourself … your conscious brain gives a clear set of instructions to your other-than-conscious brain. You ask yourself the question and often answer it very quickly yourself because the totality of your resources (conscious and unconscious) are now engaged to a common endeavor (and in most cases, you knew the answer to the problem: it just needed unlocking by you being clear with yourself).”

In his latest novel, Summertime, J. M. Coetzee carries on a lengthy interview with himself, disguised in the form of interviews conducted with various people in his life who are asked about the experiences they had with a J.M. Coetzee and the kind of person Mr. Coetzee revealed himself to be at that time.

On his blog The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer does something similar in an interview he conducted with himself about his book How We Decide. And the question Do You Talk to Yourself? was also posed on Jezebel last year. The post was written by Anna North who confesses she talks to herself all day, almost every day.

Because an injury to her wrists prevents her from typing very well, she must use voice-recognition software in order to “write.” She quotes a psychologist, Randy Engle, who claims most people talk to themselves and, moreover, in some situations it’s a good thing to do:

"When we are reading something that is quite complex, it helps to verbalize it aloud, because hearing it, and hearing the language, gives us another cue for remembering those exact words. Listening to our internal auditory memory has been found to be quite helpful to understand a particularly complex sentence."

In a promotion video for his new book, A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation, the author, Daniel Menaker, shows how much fun talking to yourself can be. Other than the books I write about, I don’t usually go out of my way to promote a book or place an ad on my blog about it. This case will be the exception. I think you’ll understand why once to view the video.

Of course, you have to be careful when you talk to yourself, especially when you do so in the presence of other people. People found mumbling something to themselves as they wander down a crowed street are usually thought to be a little bit crazy and are likely to be thrown into the loony bin.

From time to time I see a woman at Starbucks who talks and talks by herself. Not just to herself but outwardly to others, although no one else is there. When I first overhead her, it never dawned on me it was a monologue. It sounded just like a normal conversation. Eventually I must have realized I never heard someone reply. So I glanced over, only to discover there wasn’t anyone there. Still, she never seemed to stop—fully articulate sentences, pauses, continuing in a rather animated fashion. Every time I see her, it is the same. I can never quite make out what she is saying, although I am sure it makes perfect sense to her.

Minor Miracle

Paul Sturgis, the main character in Anita Brookner’s Strangers, longs for a serious conversation, an exchange with another person, almost anyone will do. Who has not longed for a genuine conversation? Who has not regretted how infrequently they occur? Here is how it happens in Leaving Las Vegas, both the novel by John O’Brien and the film directed by Mike Figgis,

“...Ben pulls back out into traffic for the short drive ahead. Instantly there is between them, however slight, that elusive chemistry which occurs only occasionally when two people meet. Always a welcome surprise, it is a sort of quick familiarity, implied permission to conduct relations at a level which is a bit deeper than the superficiality of introduction. Ben senses this and is beaming.”

Again the experience is captured perfectly in a work of fiction, this time by Haruki Murakami in a short story, Man-Eating Cats, first published in The New Yorker.

“Izumi was ten years younger than I was. We met at a business meeting. Something clicked between us the first time we laid eyes on each other. Not the kind of thing that happens all that often...We went to a small bar and had a few drinks. I can't recall exactly what we talked about but we found a million topics and could have talked forever. With a laser-like clarity, I could grasp everything she wanted to say. And things I couldn't explain well to anyone else came across to her with an exactness that took me by surprise. We were both married, with no major complaints about our married lives. We loved our spouses and respected them. Still, this was on the order of a minor miracle--running across someone to whom you can express your feelings so clearly, so completely. Most people go their entire lives without meeting a person like that. It would have been a mistake to label this "love." It was more like total empathy.”

Is it any wonder “minor miracles” like this are so rare? Instead, what I notice everywhere I look now are how utterly silent most relationships are. I notice it most vividly in some recent films. The married couple in Lantana, a film that moved me a greatly, have stopped talking to one another. They have drifted into a silent stupor, a lifeless inertia that goes on day after day. Only after they come face to face with a heartbreaking series of tragedies do they begin talking once again. I recognize that it sometimes takes such a jolt to bring two people back together.

Then there is the remarkable silence depicted in the film Talk To Me. A young woman lies motionless in a hospital bed. Her skin glistens, there is not a blemish anywhere, her chestnut hair has a lustrous sheen. She is asleep, in a permanent sleep, in a coma after being hit by a car. Benigno is by her side, he is telling her a story and then about his day, what he has been thinking and how they will decorate their apartment. She never says a word. She can’t. It doesn’t matter. Benigno continues talking. His talk is sweet, quietly animated. He is a nurse caring for Alicia in a hospital in Madrid. He has been doing this for years.

Can you talk with someone who is forever silent? How long can you continue to do that? What does it take to go on, day after day, talking to someone who is unresponsive? What else could it be but love? Benigno is in love with Alicia, although he hardly knows her. He is obsessed with Alicia. People began to wonder about him. But it never seems to bother Benigno for whom a response is not necessary.

Do we need to communicate to have a conversation? Is a silent conversation possible? Conversing isn’t necessary in Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto. There a Japanese businessman and an Italian opera singer fall in love without being able to speak to one another. The music and the experience of being together are sufficient.

I recall a question Lawrence Durrell posed in Justine, “Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?”

Fragments on Conversation

When was the last time you had a real conversation, one where you felt engaged and where the person you were talking to felt the same and together you developed each other’s ideas so that you ended some distance from where you began? David Hare puts the question more succinctly, “Have you ever been present at a panel on which one person’s perceptions built on another’s?”

Two recent books have considered the waning art of conversation. Stephen Miller writes in Conversation: A History of a Declining Art, “This is the age of the screed, the rant, the tirade, the jeremiad, the diatribe, the venom-fueled, white-hot harangue.” Well, it’s not that bad, of course, but at times it seems close.

Miller quotes Rebecca West who remarked, “There is no such thing as conversation. It is an illusion. There are intersecting monologues, that is all.” Miller’s book is largely a historical account of the nature of conversation over the centuries and the way in which we are rapidly evolving into a culture of non-conversation. He cites Cicero’s desire that it “be gentle and without a trace of intransigence; it should also be witty” and Montaigne who found the pleasure of good conversation, “… the most delightful activity in our lives.”

Theodore Zeldin continues in this vein in his book Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives. For him, “Conversation is a meeting of minds with different memories and habits. When minds meet, they don’t just exchange facts: they transform them, reshape them, draw different implications from them, engage in new trains of thought. Conversation doesn’t just reshuffle the cards: it creates new cards….That’s where I find the excitement. It’s like a spark that two minds create.”

It’s the meeting of two minds that creates conversation at it’s best. It happens so rarely but when it does, you know it in a flash. In Approaching Eye Level, Vivian Gornick writes , “Nothing makes me feel more alive, and in the world, than the sound of my own mind working in the presence of one that’s responsive.” Have you had such an experience lately?

Gornick continues, “Good conversation is dependent on a simple but mysterious fit of mind and spirit that cannot be achieved, it just occurs. It’s not a matter of mutual interests or class concerns or commonly held ideals, it’s a matter of temperament; the thing that makes someone respond instinctively...In the presence of shared temperament conversation almost never loses its free, unguarded flow. In its absence one is always walking on eggshells. Shared temperament is analogous to the way a set of gears works. The idea is not complicated but the mesh must be perfect.”

The process is also not unlike the one described by Lyn Schwartz in Rough Strife: “She thought about Michelangelo’s statues that they had seen years ago in Florence in the first excitement of their love, figures hidden in the block of stone, uncovered only by the artist’s chipping away the excess, the superficial blur, till smooth and spare, the idea shape was revealed. She and Ivan were hammer and chisel to each other.”

Scott Renfrow, a social psychologist, has wondered: “What is the source of the ineffable “chemistry” that some couples enjoy? The question is both fascinating and frustrating: fascinating because of its richness and complexity; frustrating because it has defied simple answers. Indeed, precisely why members of some couples get along better than do others has, for the most part, remained cloaked in mystery.”

For years, I have been mulling over this issue. What conditions are necessary to bring it about? It can’t be planned. It can’t be looked for. It is not well understood. We do not know if certain individuals are more likely than others to have this experience, or if certain types of personalities are more disposed than others to match up this way, and we have no clue about the kind of situations where it is most likely to occur. But if, as Gornick says, the experience is "analogous to the way a set of gears works," perhaps we will eventually come to understand it. However, whatever we might one day come to learn about this "minor miracle" will in no way affect the thrill that is to be had when it occurs.