I got on my plane from Amsterdam to New York around 11:30 Amsterdam time, 10:30 Dublin time. I was sat in a middle seat. The guy sitting by the window was maybe sixty five, the woman by the isle somewhere in her thirties. I forget how the conversation with the guy by the window began. I should have payed more attention to that. Those opening remarks are the most mysterious bit of conversation. I never know how to summon a thread out of the silence but once it’s there, it’s pretty easy to follow. You go from some vague abstraction to quickly falling down a funnel made from whatever you can least tenuously be said to have in common. I think he asked something like “going or coming?” Something situationally specific, quick to answer, unimposing except that it started things moving. An object in motion…
I find it really hard to back out of these sorts of interactions. I feel obsequious in my formal politeness. He asked a question, so now I need to ask one back. Then he asks one back, then I do. Each time the answers get longer, move intimate. We’re no longer strangers, we’re Nathaniel from Alabama, the potter, and Rob, the retired H-Vac repair business owner back from visiting his fourth kid in London. Now we have something in common, business. I just started one, he just handed one off to his nephews. Now a type of impromptu mentorship session starts. “Tell me your pitch to a restaurant. Why should they buy your pottery?” Philosophical fragments start emerging: “Life is about being good to others so that they will want to play with you.” An underlying tragedy about a break from his siblings keeps surfacing. My side of the conversation shifts to student-like answering and bland affirmation.
I felt a real mix of emotions in this situation. On the one hand, I was maybe a little bit happy to be chatting with my seat mate on the plane. It felt ethically right, like: I can still do these old-school human interaction things. I’m not just glued to my phone, isn’t that pretty cool. And I was interested in a good bit of what he had to say. I liked how he immediately latched onto the challenge of marketing a pottery business and how to sell work. But pretty early on there was a tipping point. It was partly just: well, shit, now I kinda know the guy and either I’m gonna be stuck talking to him for seven hours, or one of us is going to somehow cut off the conversation while we’re still sat right next to each other, and that’s going to be really awkward. And then secondly there was that tilting of the scales, like the funnel of conversational narrowing had become less about what we shared and more about how what we might share most expeditiously connected to what he was interested in.
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How does good conversation work? During this last week, I was traveling with my girlfriend and two of my friends from grad school. To be honest, conversation was a bit of a struggle sometimes. There was a lot of tired seeming walking through the poo streaked streets of Dublin (I’ve never seen a city with so much shit (to claim it was all dog shit doesn’t seem right) on the pavement), or even eating meals. We aren’t a talking all the time sort of group. Was our conversation less than adequate? It certainly felt strained sometimes, like the silences were heavy, not directly uncomfortable, but contributing to a general sense of fatigue that isn’t what you’d think of for friends who haven’t seen each other in over a year type of reunion.
Now I’m thinking about talking with papa, my grandfather. He’s in his nineties and a retired law professor. He’s one of these older men with lots of stories, but not so many that you have’t heard them many times before. He can talk pretty endlessly in some situations, but around this time last year, I stayed with him and my grandmother for about a month. I was just back from grad school and one of the things I’d really wanted to do was to spend a good chunk of time just living with them. I’d go on walks every morning for about two hours and then eat lunch with papa. And we’d just sit there eating Campbell’s vegetable soup with crackers and margarine, total silence. I know that papa was actually really worried about me taking those walks. Part of his survival mechanism as a totally-no-contact-with-reality, head-in-the-clouds-professor type is a deep fear of the dark, the cold, and being alone in either of those things especially. I think he was pretty on edge worried about me at least some of the times I was out on my walk, and there was a type of quiet relief in my presence back in the house.
With that guy on the plane, I allowed for longer and longer pauses after he’d offer some advice. It probably sort of looked like I was pondering deeply what he had to say. That was the polite impression I was trying to give, and it was sort of true. But also, I was losing the will to maintain the student-role. I’d ask questions about his experiences, try to redirect the conversation, but he always fell back into pedagogy mode and my silent reflections got longer.
With my friends and Ivy, the silences felt related to a sort of semi-diplomatic challenge. What do all four of us have in common? How do all four of us know each other. Things that felt exclusionary to one or more of the four of us would probably be avoided. I thought about this in terms of personality too. I wouldn’t act around the three of them how I would around any one of them individually. And I feel that there was quite a wide range of how any of us did act around each other one on one.
I’ve been sitting with this for some days now and trying to find the like, deep poetry, beauty in it or something. Because I really don’t want to suggest that being around my friends and around Ivy all at once was in any way unenjoyable. It was really really lovely and I know that I will always remember those four days in Dublin very fondly. But I also know that it contained many moments that might not look the most… enthusiastic? excited, cheery, easy-going, fast paced, fun. I think what really has come up for me in reflecting on all that is the very simple foundation that the whole experience came from and was constantly sustained by a desire to see each other. There never felt as though there were any question of that. Everyone wanted to be there.
This is a bit extreme and a lot of projecting, but those mainly silent lunches with Papa, maybe in those moments, recovering from the fear that I’d slipped into the Ottawa river or just spontaneously frozen, his silence was a mark of a deeper awareness of my presence and his care for me. When I think about the potential death of a loved one, just being in their presence feels really meaningful and words feel sort of extraneous and somewhat diminishing. Or they require a bravery in openly acknowledging the depth of feeling and the closeness to the other person that I more or less find impossible.
Back to the plane ride home, that guy trying to help me run my business, there was this real turn in the conversation, especially when I started slowing down on my answers. He’d asked me about how I ended up in Atlanta and I told him about moving with my brother when he started grad school. That’s when this thread of his relationship with his brother/siblings started coming out. What I got from it was that there was some sort of conflict a good number of years ago. Something to do with him being pretty controlling of the business and wanting to take it in a certain direction, them not necessarily being up for it. He ended up buying up a majority portion of the stock in the business from either those same siblings or other ones, I don’t really know and doing things the way he wanted. This seemed somewhat at odds with his “play nice with others first and they’ll play nice with you” philosophy.
I often tell people that me and Ben get along very well everywhere except in the kitchen because we disagree on cooking strategy a lot. This is basically true, though I probably play it up a bit to create a sense of conflict. Plane guy took this really seriously. He used it as a business teaching moment. He talked about how I should find a way to help Ben with a recipe, just ask him how I could be useful and do that. I thought that it was just something that he was using as an example, but then later on near the end of the flight when we began saying our goodbyes, he said that what he hoped most for me was that I’d have a good relationship with my brother and find ways to resolve any conflicts we might have. If I’d been a really good conversationalist, would I have done something with the pretty obvious information he was showing me that he was hurting from the rift that had formed with his brother? Those weren’t the roles we’d fallen into, he was going mentor, I was doing attentive pupil, but the really meaningful lasting message from the whole convo, probably for both of us, was reflecting on the bitterness of family strife and his pain at not being close with his brother any more. Everything else was just (a lot of) fluff.
I actually did get out of the conversation on the plane about an hour in. I just said I was going to listen to some music and put my headphones on. It was pretty difficult to say, but actually, I think he really appreciated it too. He seemed a bit relieved. I don’t think he’d planned on a polite way to take breaks in the conversation either, and he would have just kept on going, maybe for the whole flight if I didn’t say anything.
Today is the January New Moon. I’ve been paying attention to the moon as a way of giving my life rhythm outside of school. As the moon moves towards darkness, I’ve felt myself curling in on myself, sitting with a lot of childhood memories. I can remember the sort of slow process of becoming more shy. Thinking as a ten year old, oh, I recognize that it takes me a lot longer to take my guard off around someone now. A few years later savoring those moments when the guard came down as very brief reposes in constant social performance. The formulaic politeness of conversation was a big part of this. Learning scripts of how to introduce myself, how to be polite. Recognizing that that was a thing, learning how to do it, and then realizing that I don’t know how to talk to most people anymore without those scripts
At some point, those scripts of social politeness became so deeply engrained that they feel authentically and fully me. And we all take them on in our own way. Like clothes or music preferences. It’s something external that is internalized to the point of articulating something unique about yourself. But all these moments I’ve been talking about, they make me feel the distance that still exists between conversation put through the sieve of decorum and the direct expression of emotion. Maybe to say that that was possible sometime before my tween years is to give little Nathaniel too much credit. But in any case, there are a lot of emotions that are very hard to do justice too within the conversational range that is available most of the time. Often there is a beauty to that which reflects the limitations of language in general: this is only a surface conveying something much, much more complex and strange. But sometimes that limitation feels like an insurmountable hurdle. How could Rob, the plane guy, tell a twenty something year old stranger how much he hurts from the break with his siblings? How could papa fully express all the layers of emotion brought up by me taking a long walk by the river in January in Canada?
The tragic undertones of those two things aren’t there in the same way with my friends in Dublin. But the largeness and awkwardness of emotion, at least on my side, was. In the face of a lot of all that, silence was a way to hold to the truth of those emotions without doing them the injustice of mis-articulating them through inappropriate and conventional forms. In silence, you give that pre-socially conformed little kid space to exist, at least internally. And the strength of a good friendship in these socially conditioned times involves recognizing that depth and emotion within the silence and being able to sit with it, together, and maybe, though by no means certainly, the inner children will come to the surface at their own timid pace.