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The Background for Good Conversation - part 6
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But experience and observation, while best in themselves, are perhaps hard and inadequate teachers, in that they take time, are haphazard, and do not cover as much of man and his world as a good conversationalist needs. One cannot, for example, experience man's past history. Therefore, they need to be supplemented by reading. This is the quickest way to acquire conversational wealth, and the surest way to avoid painful gaps in our knowledge. It also gives us vicarious experience. Life is too short to do all the things and see all the places one should be able to talk about. Reading about them (or seeing plays or motion pictures about them) is our best recourse. One must read to be up to date, to know, and to feel.
Current events are the preliminaries of most conversation. One must therefore keep abreast of them by reading a newspaper for local news, and a news magazine or the equivalent for national and international events. Through them and other general magazines one learns about prominent personalities, scientific progress, cultural activities — all valuable matter for conversation. Shakespeare said, "The man that hath not music in himself ... is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils." One can as truly say that the man or woman that knows nothing about music, art, and literature, and about their creators is not prepared for refined conversation. In addition to the keeping-up-to-date reading, there must be reading for permanent knowledge and for emotional adjustment. The former is best derived from the class of nonfiction books. There is something in the hard cover of books, as distinguished from the paper cover of magazines, which justly symbolizes enduring values. To be a worthwhile conversationalist, one must read books: histories, biographies, travelogues; books on religion, economics, psychology, and philosophy. I am not a scientist, but even one general book about scientific progress and science personalities, DeKruif s Microbe Hunters, has given me a hundred conversational supports. Nor should one rationalize that because one may not have time to finish a book one had better not start it. Nonfiction reading may well be done in parts and starts. The greatest readers are those who not only choose their books but also of many books choose only such portions as give them most for their time or solve their particular problem. It is for emotional adjustment that one must read literature proper — poetry, drama, and fiction. To describe their full value is beyond the scope here. Their true function is to give us wisdom, balance, emotional perspective and calm. They give us vicarious experience, they make us sympathize with the other fellow, and they help us to see ourselves as others see us. As philosophic books should give us peace of mind, as religious books should give us peace of soul, so poems, novels, plays should give us peace of heart. Since the soul never fully rests, as St. Augustine wrote, until it rests in God, this triple peace — of mind, of soul, of heart — cannot in this "vale of tears" be fully realized. But even the smallest progress toward such peace is an enormous gain — for ourselves and for those with whom we associate. That poetry, drama, and fiction further peace of heart is the feeling of the collective wisdom of the human race, which I wish the reader would here accept on my word. Peace of heart cannot be weighed and measured, nor can it be whistled on or whistled off. It is a development. Nor, while one can trust to some effect, can one say precisely how much any one good novel does affect it.
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