The art of conversation

One of the reasons why I tend to find it difficult to engage in causal conversation is the high standards I have for it. Unless I (or someone else) has something particularly original, witty, or thoughtful to say, I get bored and anxious in conversational contexts very quickly.* But perhaps my standards for causal conversation aren't high, they're simply wrong.

"Obviously", you may think. And it seems that the experts on the conversational art would agree. Here's Virginia Woolf, for instance, on the subject:

There must be talk, and it must be general, and it must be about everything. It must not go too deep, and it must not be too clever, for if it went too far in either of these directions somebody was sure to feel out of it, and to sit balancing with his tea cup, saying nothing.

(From the The New York Review of Books)

So, according to Woolf, it's not just that conversation needn't be any of things I demand, it's that it shouldn't be any of these things, at least to any great degree. So the norms I've been applying to myself and others when conversing with them - the norms that are the source of so much anxiety for me when making conversation - are simply the product of my failure to identify the real aims of conversation.

I suppose this is more or less right. But if these are the norms that govern conversation, this seems to raise the question of why conversation was and is considered by so many so terribly valuable. After all, do we really want to be part of a conversation in which, "if anyone said a brilliant thing it was felt to be rather a breach of etiquette—an accident that one ignored, like a fit of sneezing, or some catastrophe with a muffin." To my mind, at least, there seems to be something rather perverse in the idea of conversing with others while simultaneously making sure that what one has to say is not too intelligent or too provocative. Of course, such conversation will bring the pleasures that come whenever we interact with others. But shouldn't it be possible to enjoy these pleasures without limiting ourselves to talk that is of an artificially low level?

* This, for example, is why I've always found the conversations people have while high so insufferable. But here again, the reflections above may help to explain why otherwise intelligent people find drugs a suitable conversational aid. After all, if the comments above are correct, then the greatest obstacle to good conversation among intelligent people may sometimes be, not a lack of intelligence, but rather an excess of it.