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Improving Our Talking Life - part 2
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But so as not to have anyone imagine that it is only the men who lay down rules for conversation, and possibly that, while seeming to encourage it, they slyly want to hedge it so about with their rules that the sex which is said to talk as naturally as champagne bubbles might have its talk methodized into a mere fizz, I quote the dean of women essayists, Miss Agnes Repplier. In her essay, "The Luxury of Conversation," she insists, "People equipped with reason, sentiment, and a vocabulary should have something to talk about." This strongly underwrites Johnson's insistence on knowledge, command of words, and imagination. However, in "A Question of Politeness," she would appear to make St. Paul's graciousness the keystone of good talk. She says, "For to be civilized is to be incapable of giving unnecessary offense."
Elsewhere in the essay, she links good conversation, as St. Paul does, to our spiritual life. She says: . . . the perpetual surrender which politeness dictates cuts down to a reasonable figure the sum total of selfishness. To listen when we are bored, to talk when we are listless . . . these things brace the sinews of our souls. . . . They discipline us for the good of the community. There it is! Talking graciously and with "an edge of liveliness" braces the sinews of our souls and "discipline[s] us for the good of the community." That is why all of us, for the good of our own souls and for the good of our fellow men, who are our brothers in Christ, must ever try to become more ready talkers, more gracious talkers. We must keep whetting "the edge of liveliness" of our conversation! The truth about this matter of talking is that, far more even than our eyes, our conversation is the reflection and expression of our souls, the mark of our personality. The conversation of any group of us together or, if you will, of Catholics or of Quakers or of Americans, when they are together, is the truest index of their culture. Just as truly as the Bible says that by their fruit you shall know them, can one say that by their words one can know them. Our words it is that strike others as sweet or sour, that move them to want more of us, or less. The more one thinks about it the more one comes to feel that talk is life's visible spark and circuit, the magnetism that holds the human race together. Even deaf-mutes cannot live together without their sign talking. It is so important to human beings that, as their bodies cannot live without food and drink, their spirit likewise seems to wither without talk. That is why, next to outright mayhem and execution, the worst punishment governments know to inflict on human beings is solitary confinement. In retreat houses, the hardest mortification spiritual directors impose is silence. Those who have gone through the experience know that during a three-day self-imposed silence the very world seems to stop — and ideas turn upside down. The keenest joy after such a retreat is not the prospect of a good dinner, but the anticipation of a good talk.
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