His real being became gradually subsumed within a prankish contrivance of his own design, and thereafter it was nearly impossible to know what he really thought. He became more and more fond of not answering questions, or answering them with a sentiment opposite his real one--trusting at first, I suppose, that his hearer would apprehend the nature of this prank, and share the joke, but soon enough forswearing even that faith, and trusting himself more and more to answering with falsehood, or distortion, or some bombastic claim all irrespective of truth or the way things stood in the common perception. As he became a more daring liar, his need for props and supports and safety nets withdrew, until he became quite happy to launch off into an open environment of prevarication without the least fear for his safety.

Addled with Adler

I spent most of the day yesterday wandering around Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, not accomplishing much, loitering along the waterfront, studying for long minutes the bowsprit of the USS Constellation, and the gammoning iron and other rigging of Pride of Baltimore II. I was happy to be confirmed in this non-productiveness by a new understanding of the word “leisure,” given to me by Mortimer Adler in a recorded lecture he gave some years ago on how to speak and how to listen. Leisure is a verb, Adler said, used as we use words like “work” or “play”--I work, I play, I leisure--and it denotes those activities of the mind whose end is the growth of sprit, intellect, and imagination.

I must say though that in other ways I begin to question some of Adler’s assertions and assumptions, those very premises upon which he based so much of his theory of the Great Books education, and the importance of reading. I question them the more so now as I come to see how strongly those ideas have swayed my own education, coming to me all unbeknownst through the intermediary of another great University of Chicago stalwart, Richard Mitchell.

For example, I swallow with the greatest difficulty the notion that conversation, as Adler asserts, admits of only two important ends: to persuade, and to inform. Conversation rightly considered, says he, is useful only when it is being used to influence—he himself prefers the word “sell”—and when it is being used to inform, to instruct, to confer information. And it is for these ends only that we should remain courteous, alert and respectful in conversation, for conversation does nothing more important.

No doubt there are delights in conversation, benefits of conversation, understanding produced by conversation, that go well beyond the twin objectives of selling and informing. Adler’s abomination of cocktail chatter I think betrays a blindness in this regard: He fails to see or will not affirm conversation’s value as a social lubricant, a protocol of introduction and developing intimacy. Those who would be friends, who would know each other’s minds, anticipate each other’s needs and support each other’s deficiencies, must begin that relationship with a conversation. Surely I don’t need to hammer this point home when so many others have done that work already—Eric Bern, Deborah Tannen, Carol Gilligan, by god, even John Gray and his Venus and Mars, to name a few. Conversation establishes social status, and then often tries to erase those differences it has revealed. Conversation situates participants in the social environment.

Furthermore, we might conclude conversation to be a very dull and mechanical thing if we grant it nothing more than the power of rehearsing ideas already present in the minds of the participants, as Adler seems to want to do, and not recognizing in it that enlivening energy that can illuminate, elucidate, magnify and sometimes transform those very ideas. Conversation breeds insight, surely, as much for the speaker as for the hearer, if not more. Where two conversationalists speak and listen to each other with care, and stick stubbornly to topic, insight abounds like very flowers, and thinking and conceptualization bear afterwards the salubrious marks of refinement and polish for having been brought into such contact with the thoughts of another, whether in agreement or not.

Therefore I take it as self-evident that the best objectives of conversation may very well be these: Not persuasion or teaching, but the fostering or insight, friendship, and might I also say the fine example of beautiful, elegant, eloquent speech.