conversation

There is a person whose acquaintance and conversation I do earnestly recommend unto you as thing of the greatest advantage: you will be surprised when I tell you it is yourself.

I struggle in every lecture and conversation and correspondence to grasp exactly the most acute and incisive way of phrasing issues, but it was precisely to discourage students and readers from making false idols of my ways of phrasing things that I have sought always to recast issues in alternative ways of interpreting or terming them.  Every attempt at wording issues has its idiomatic potential deformities, its wayward or stray implications and connotations.  There is never just one absolutely right way of phrasing anything.  Words are not perfectly equivalent to or univocal with principles or ideas or values.  The liveliness or freedom of our minds is expressed in our agility at varying not just perspectives but also verbal constructions:  we must always struggle to preserve distance between ourselves and our verbalizations as our intellectual and moral creatures. 

We shook hands. Norm’s hand felt like salted mackerel. Our brief interaction had put him in a talkative mood. “There’s no business like shoe business,” he uttered with a death rattle laugh, heh heh, peering at me sideways like a depraved cherub as he droned on and on about the good old days in the shoe business, the bonus money and the belles whose stockinged ankles he fondled when he could still get a boner … but my mind was elsewhere. I couldn’t stop thinking about Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman, Luke Soloman. Who was this character?

Leadership, for me, is just this. For some reason you are given the task of identifying capacities in others. In other words, when I’ve been put in leadership positions, it was not about me doing anything. It was about me looking around and saying, for example, “Oh, Joan. This is really for her. And this is really for him.” And then not just making it happen over their dead bodies, but recognizing, out of the circle of acquaintances that you have, that these are the right people therefore the task. Or, let’s say you have a kind of person in mind, but there is no such person in your circle. You recognize you need a certain kind of person and you know that person is out there somewhere. If you hold the image long enough, they will show up.

So you create the picture; you hold it, and over the course of a year or two, that person steps into your life, and you recognize him or her. You feel them out a little bit, the acquaintanceship builds up, and then you spring on them what you have in mind. If you’ve been a good judge, they light up. Because they know that much in their life has been a preparation for this conversation.

In my life there have been several individuals whose presence made it easier for me to think, pleasanter to make my responses.

For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.  But the deep collision is and has been with my unregenerate, tormenting and tormented self...I am unable to become what I see.  I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful halt, "won't go"...

The reading of all good books is indeed like a conversation with the noblest men of past centuries who were the authors of them, nay a carefully studied conversation, in which they reveal to us none but the best of their thoughts.

The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.

Good conversation, like a defensive driver, yields the right of way.

Do you know that conversation is one of the greatest pleasures in life? But it wants leisure.