7 ms·

The Lost Art of Conversation (1899)

gardenfelder 4y ago
This url [1] seems to work [1] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/09/the-lost-art-of-conversation/ https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/09/the-lost-art-of-...
- dang 4y ago
  It contains a short excerpt followed by the link the OP submitted. As commenters have pointed out, that pdf (or whatever it is) is hard to read. It would be nice if someone could find another copy of the original text.
readthenotes1 4y ago
"We are reading ourselves into a silent race." If only!
- eficek 4y ago
  Reading twitter posts and facebook walls, maybe. I wonder though, if the same thing was said for email and instant messaging when it was first popularized.
  - lanstin 4y ago
    Even writing: https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-... But there are still plenty of book clubs, I was in one for years, and I read a lot of books and talked about them. Books I wouldn’t have picked in a thousand years but were none the less fascinating, and easier to finish what with the group effort.
LoveMortuus 4y ago
I don't know... When I'm reading something that really excites me I usually want to tell others about it and talk about it, why it excited me, what I find interesting, thus encouraging conversation.
- supertofu 4y ago
  I feel the exact same way. Except it seems that no one I ever meet cares a single bit about about the topics that excite me, and aren't polite or curious enough to indulge me 1-3 minutes to share the exciting things about these topics. So usually I just listen to people talk about themselves. :/
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Curiosity made infectious
  - MrVandemar 4y ago
    There's a lot of it about. I usually solve programming problems in my head until they stop talking.
    - shakezula 4y ago
      Not to be rude, but the other person can likely tell you’re feigning interest and probably feels similarly as you do about your lack of interest in the things that interest /them/. Ask more thoughtful questions and you’ll likely be surprised at the ones you’ll get back.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  I'd love to hear about this! Anything you're reading like that lately? To your point, though, I live in a major and supposedly-sophisticated city, and one of my go-to smalltalk questions is, "So, what're you reading these days?" I don't know if I've become an old grump — or if I just have poor luck of the draw — but lately it's been a deeply depressing question. A staggering number of people will quietly (or, occasionally, proudly) unveil the fact that they don't read at all.
balutdev 4y ago
The article in its current format is almost unreadable. The art of conversation is unknown to many. I attempt to explain to others that conversation is a volley - not a match. Serve up softballs, allow others to answer questions, and then return the favor by asking a question. Conversations with the iPad generation are almost worthless. Conversations with strangers are often fruitless. I am silent for the most part because people cannot speak in a manner that would suggest they have any interest outside of their own pleasures.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  I'm fed up with conversations. I value altruistic softness, politeness and being sociable. But it's a shallow muddy game without the right feel or tension. Too much time it devolves on vague if not fluff talk where people are more focused on liability rather than honesty, fun, joy or thinking. Even with best efforts in seeking shared fun the stats are too low.
  - edmcnulty101 4y ago
    > where people are more focused on liability rather than honesty, fun, joy or thinking. You have to find people who don't give a fuck. They're way more fun to talk to.
    - agumonkey 4y ago
      Partly true, you don't want totally free radicals either :)
- p1esk 4y ago
  You must be fun at parties
  - dcow 4y ago
    But, do you have fun at parties?
- dcow 4y ago
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
FYI: The article itself is on the top right of the pseudo-PDF that this link renders. After reading it, I thought it was funny to imagine "reading" replace with "Instagram" in the original author's invective. It would be so much fun to live in a world where everyone was constantly reading books everywhere now! But, these days, whenever there's an idle moment, most people reach for their phones and plug in to the nearest dopamine feed. Maybe this is just how it goes. In 25 years, maybe everyone will just don their VR goggles while they're on public transit, and people will long for the days when everyone sat around scrolling their phones, and it was still possible to make eye contact.
- lloeki 4y ago
  > whenever there's an idle moment, most people reach for their phones and plug in to the nearest dopamine feed Then take a peek at the first one, "The Egregious Now". I don't think you even have to change a single word!
- atoav 4y ago
  I might have been that dude on the bus stop who grabbed his phone. What you might not have realized was that I was writing my master thesis there. And when I was not writing I was reading and annotating sources. A phone looks like a phone, it is very hard to know what people do on it. They could make a bank transfer, read Aristoteles, look at puppy pictures, read the news, chat to an old friend, ...
simple10 4y ago
Reading old newspapers is an intoxicating cocktail. One part smugness of hindsight and one part affinity for the common struggle. My favorite random book purchase was from a multi-generational bookstore in San Francisco. Like many, it had succumbed to the pressures of rising rent and declining interest in musty parchment. In their going-out-of-business clearance pile, I happened upon an oversized binding of newspapers from Manchester, England. Partially water damaged on the edges but perfectly legible. Upon opening the book, curiosity quickly escalated to bibliophilic euphoria. This collection turned out to be from the early 1940's during The Blitz when the Nazis were bombing the shizer out of England. The best part... the Ovaltine ads. Apparently, Ovaltine used to be sold as a health elixir to calm your nerves before bed. I'm not sure how a chocolate malt drink aids sleep, but they must have sold well because the half and full page ads were in every paper. I've never had the pleasure of speaking with someone who grew up in Manchester during that time. What strange association they must have for Ovaltine. Comfort or terror? Hard to say.
- alexpotato 4y ago
  Old books as well. I recently read some books written during the late 1800's through to World War 1 about sniping (aka long distance military shooting). It was fascinating on so many levels: - The language was completely readable. On the one hand that makes sense but on the other it's wild to read something from over 100 years ago and still find it enjoyable and get a lot of the jokes etc - Seeing a discipline still relatively in its infancy develop in combat conditions was incredibly interesting. One book in particular mentions the psychology and persuasion required to convince command to adopt new technologies and tactics At the end of the day, you realize "we're all just people" spending a large amount of our time dealing with other people. The clothes and technologies change but we still stay largely the same.
- adammarples 4y ago
  My grandmother would swear that Ovaltine would help you sleep. She was from Sheffield.
  - natmaka 4y ago
eficek 4y ago
"Is a Horseless Age Coming" is the story directly beneath it... another story with nerve-wracking relevance if you rewrite it about the rapidly-progressing-and-soon-to-be-omnipresent technology of today as opposed to 1900.
- lloeki 4y ago
  The first one, "The Egregious Now", is uncannily relevant, highlighting the perils of instant gratification and the demise of critical thinking.
bwoodward 4y ago
The article... automatically transcribed using iOS. --- It is high time that some one with authority announced that reading is not the summum bonum of life. The very act of reading is unsocial. It is a kind of melancholy barbarism. If you look The Lost Art of Conversation IT IS high time that some one in authority announced that reading is not the summum bonum of life. The very act of reading is unsocial. It is a kind of melancholy barbarism. If you look about you in a railway train, in a street car or ‘bus you will observe that every one is reading–men, women, and even the innocent little children. Silent, glum, their eyes glued to book or paper, they sit there, like so many savages brooding in a jungle. Where are the jolly conversations that Washington Irving and Dickens overheard in the stage-coaches of the long ago? Where is the cheery sociability that once made traveling a liberal education? Conversation is in the way of becoming a lost art – like the making of mummies and the laying of the great auk's egg. We have such a precious deal of reading to do that conversation is out of the question. We have no time to talk. We have no leisure for comparing ideas as to the weather. It is not impossible to imagine a day when “How late the spring is!” and “Doesn't it look like rain?” will be quite obsolete. We are reading ourselves into a silent race. When we stay at home we read; we travel to read. In lonely forests, on far-away mountain peaks, aship, ashore, our generation wanders – and reads. At this very moment some one is reading in the desert of the Sahara and another is reading as he treks the African veldt, and Andre himself is ice-bound near the Pole, reading. Before long monastic institutions for the undisturbed pursuit of reading will doubtless arise all over the land. Reading is the superstition of the day. The amount of printed matter we have read is accounted to us for a sort of righteousness. I stopped to watch some boys playing baseball the other day. There was a duffer at the bat, and the little left-fielder pulled a paper from his hip pocket and began to read. General Shafter, it is averred, lay in a hammock and directed the battle, at odd moments dipping his nose into the newspapers. Conversation is decaying and we are degenerating into unsocial silence. This is not a negligible danger. Man's chief duty – his unending duty – the proper aim of life is to talk. Soldiers fight, statesmen plan, artists paint, poets rhyme merely that they may talk and be talked about. Men live nobly in order to have fine topics of conversation. Books are written not so much to be read as to be talked over. The decay of conversation is a ready-made subject for the critically minded man. The divergence between the written and spoken language is growing wider every day. We talk in a sort of telegraphic slang. No sane man would think of introducing into his conversation the phrases and words of the written language. Very little of the spoken language gets into print. In the end the books will beat the tongues. Already we exchange ideas with printed pages not with our fellow-men- and I foresee the dismal day when even our present emasculated conversation will be superfluous. We shall read our way in silence from the cradle to the grave. VANCE THOMPSON. ---
pygy_ 4y ago
Complimentary sound track by The Divine Comedy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MVESWB1CBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MVESWB1CBg
deleted 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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siftyy 4y ago
Much of the conversation in this thread leaves me a bit sad. Depriving a person a social interaction is some of the harshest punishment given in the US prison system. To assert that instagram, or emojis, or VR is devaluing that in some way doesn’t sit right with me. Even a conversation I might view as “worthless” still gives deep insight into that persons inner thought process. And I’m certain I’d rather have worthless conversations than be deprived of human interaction. Perhaps things are changing too quickly for many people to process, myself included, but overall I’m bullish on new technologies enabling deeper more meaningful connections.
- Test0129 4y ago
  I can't agree. Except in what I can only imagine are niche communities I have not experienced a "modern" conversation that could match what I would consider social interaction. Certainly you could come up with probably 1,000 counter examples, but from my sample of interactions on discord/instagram/etc (before I got rid of all of it) the vast majority of interactions were parasitic in nature. It was nothing like the forums of yore, pre-eternal-september USENET, etc. There's a reason people are so depressed these days. The social interactions the average terminally online person gets only have a veneer of reality associated to them. You only notice it once you manage to disconnect and compare those interactions to the real world. I've had better conversations with a half cocked patron at a bar than I have had on any given "modern" avenue of communication. No amount of technology will ever surpass actual human connection until our forebrains permanently melt away. At the end of the day we are constantly trying to "connect better" when the answer is, unironically, to simply go outside.
kstenerud 4y ago
The articles in this paper sound an awful lot like letters to the editor: Trite complaints about non-issues and "old man's worries" about the kids today. With the conversation article itself, the complaints he raises are overblown even looking back at it now. I've lived in many countries and traveled to many more, and one thing I've always taken note of is how and when people hold conversations: it depends almost entirely upon local culture. You're much more likely to have conversations with strangers in the countryside than in the city. You're FAR more likely to have a conversation with random Portuguese than with random Germans. Traveling Japanese are far more interesting and open than Japanese at home, whereas the opposite could be said of the British. The Vietnamese keep to themselves whereas Cambodians are happy to meet strange people. People are far more friendly in Lyon than in Paris. San Franciscans are far more likely to talk at you than with you (even vs just across the bay in Oakland).
- user_named 4y ago
  Your comments are on point an match with my experience. I'm currently in China and I still haven't figured out small talk here. It generally doesn't occur, but sometimes it does. I can't figure out exactly when and why after ten years.
givemeethekeys 4y ago
I wonder if public libraries came along before or after this article was written. I'm glad to see that the spoken tongue is holding up well against, if not dictating, the written language.

This url [1] seems to work [1] https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/09/the-lost-art-of-conversation/ https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2022/09/the-lost-art-of-...

dang 4y ago
It contains a short excerpt followed by the link the OP submitted. As commenters have pointed out, that pdf (or whatever it is) is hard to read. It would be nice if someone could find another copy of the original text.

readthenotes1 4y ago

"We are reading ourselves into a silent race." If only!

eficek 4y ago
Reading twitter posts and facebook walls, maybe. I wonder though, if the same thing was said for email and instant messaging when it was first popularized.
- lanstin 4y ago
  Even writing: https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-on-the-forgetfulness-that-comes-with-writing https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-... But there are still plenty of book clubs, I was in one for years, and I read a lot of books and talked about them. Books I wouldn’t have picked in a thousand years but were none the less fascinating, and easier to finish what with the group effort.

LoveMortuus 4y ago

I don't know... When I'm reading something that really excites me I usually want to tell others about it and talk about it, why it excited me, what I find interesting, thus encouraging conversation.

supertofu 4y ago
I feel the exact same way. Except it seems that no one I ever meet cares a single bit about about the topics that excite me, and aren't polite or curious enough to indulge me 1-3 minutes to share the exciting things about these topics. So usually I just listen to people talk about themselves. :/
- euroderf 4y ago
  Curiosity made infectious
- MrVandemar 4y ago
  There's a lot of it about. I usually solve programming problems in my head until they stop talking.
  - shakezula 4y ago
    Not to be rude, but the other person can likely tell you’re feigning interest and probably feels similarly as you do about your lack of interest in the things that interest /them/. Ask more thoughtful questions and you’ll likely be surprised at the ones you’ll get back.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
I'd love to hear about this! Anything you're reading like that lately? To your point, though, I live in a major and supposedly-sophisticated city, and one of my go-to smalltalk questions is, "So, what're you reading these days?" I don't know if I've become an old grump — or if I just have poor luck of the draw — but lately it's been a deeply depressing question. A staggering number of people will quietly (or, occasionally, proudly) unveil the fact that they don't read at all.

balutdev 4y ago

The article in its current format is almost unreadable. The art of conversation is unknown to many. I attempt to explain to others that conversation is a volley - not a match. Serve up softballs, allow others to answer questions, and then return the favor by asking a question. Conversations with the iPad generation are almost worthless. Conversations with strangers are often fruitless. I am silent for the most part because people cannot speak in a manner that would suggest they have any interest outside of their own pleasures.

agumonkey 4y ago
I'm fed up with conversations. I value altruistic softness, politeness and being sociable. But it's a shallow muddy game without the right feel or tension. Too much time it devolves on vague if not fluff talk where people are more focused on liability rather than honesty, fun, joy or thinking. Even with best efforts in seeking shared fun the stats are too low.
- edmcnulty101 4y ago
  > where people are more focused on liability rather than honesty, fun, joy or thinking. You have to find people who don't give a fuck. They're way more fun to talk to.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    Partly true, you don't want totally free radicals either :)
p1esk 4y ago
You must be fun at parties
- dcow 4y ago
  But, do you have fun at parties?
dcow 4y ago

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago

FYI: The article itself is on the top right of the pseudo-PDF that this link renders. After reading it, I thought it was funny to imagine "reading" replace with "Instagram" in the original author's invective. It would be so much fun to live in a world where everyone was constantly reading books everywhere now! But, these days, whenever there's an idle moment, most people reach for their phones and plug in to the nearest dopamine feed. Maybe this is just how it goes. In 25 years, maybe everyone will just don their VR goggles while they're on public transit, and people will long for the days when everyone sat around scrolling their phones, and it was still possible to make eye contact.

lloeki 4y ago
> whenever there's an idle moment, most people reach for their phones and plug in to the nearest dopamine feed Then take a peek at the first one, "The Egregious Now". I don't think you even have to change a single word!
atoav 4y ago
I might have been that dude on the bus stop who grabbed his phone. What you might not have realized was that I was writing my master thesis there. And when I was not writing I was reading and annotating sources. A phone looks like a phone, it is very hard to know what people do on it. They could make a bank transfer, read Aristoteles, look at puppy pictures, read the news, chat to an old friend, ...

simple10 4y ago

Reading old newspapers is an intoxicating cocktail. One part smugness of hindsight and one part affinity for the common struggle. My favorite random book purchase was from a multi-generational bookstore in San Francisco. Like many, it had succumbed to the pressures of rising rent and declining interest in musty parchment. In their going-out-of-business clearance pile, I happened upon an oversized binding of newspapers from Manchester, England. Partially water damaged on the edges but perfectly legible. Upon opening the book, curiosity quickly escalated to bibliophilic euphoria. This collection turned out to be from the early 1940's during The Blitz when the Nazis were bombing the shizer out of England. The best part... the Ovaltine ads. Apparently, Ovaltine used to be sold as a health elixir to calm your nerves before bed. I'm not sure how a chocolate malt drink aids sleep, but they must have sold well because the half and full page ads were in every paper. I've never had the pleasure of speaking with someone who grew up in Manchester during that time. What strange association they must have for Ovaltine. Comfort or terror? Hard to say.

alexpotato 4y ago
Old books as well. I recently read some books written during the late 1800's through to World War 1 about sniping (aka long distance military shooting). It was fascinating on so many levels: - The language was completely readable. On the one hand that makes sense but on the other it's wild to read something from over 100 years ago and still find it enjoyable and get a lot of the jokes etc - Seeing a discipline still relatively in its infancy develop in combat conditions was incredibly interesting. One book in particular mentions the psychology and persuasion required to convince command to adopt new technologies and tactics At the end of the day, you realize "we're all just people" spending a large amount of our time dealing with other people. The clothes and technologies change but we still stay largely the same.
adammarples 4y ago
My grandmother would swear that Ovaltine would help you sleep. She was from Sheffield.
- natmaka 4y ago

eficek 4y ago

"Is a Horseless Age Coming" is the story directly beneath it... another story with nerve-wracking relevance if you rewrite it about the rapidly-progressing-and-soon-to-be-omnipresent technology of today as opposed to 1900.

lloeki 4y ago
The first one, "The Egregious Now", is uncannily relevant, highlighting the perils of instant gratification and the demise of critical thinking.

bwoodward 4y ago

The article... automatically transcribed using iOS. --- It is high time that some one with authority announced that reading is not the summum bonum of life. The very act of reading is unsocial. It is a kind of melancholy barbarism. If you look The Lost Art of Conversation IT IS high time that some one in authority announced that reading is not the summum bonum of life. The very act of reading is unsocial. It is a kind of melancholy barbarism. If you look about you in a railway train, in a street car or ‘bus you will observe that every one is reading–men, women, and even the innocent little children. Silent, glum, their eyes glued to book or paper, they sit there, like so many savages brooding in a jungle. Where are the jolly conversations that Washington Irving and Dickens overheard in the stage-coaches of the long ago? Where is the cheery sociability that once made traveling a liberal education? Conversation is in the way of becoming a lost art – like the making of mummies and the laying of the great auk's egg. We have such a precious deal of reading to do that conversation is out of the question. We have no time to talk. We have no leisure for comparing ideas as to the weather. It is not impossible to imagine a day when “How late the spring is!” and “Doesn't it look like rain?” will be quite obsolete. We are reading ourselves into a silent race. When we stay at home we read; we travel to read. In lonely forests, on far-away mountain peaks, aship, ashore, our generation wanders – and reads. At this very moment some one is reading in the desert of the Sahara and another is reading as he treks the African veldt, and Andre himself is ice-bound near the Pole, reading. Before long monastic institutions for the undisturbed pursuit of reading will doubtless arise all over the land. Reading is the superstition of the day. The amount of printed matter we have read is accounted to us for a sort of righteousness. I stopped to watch some boys playing baseball the other day. There was a duffer at the bat, and the little left-fielder pulled a paper from his hip pocket and began to read. General Shafter, it is averred, lay in a hammock and directed the battle, at odd moments dipping his nose into the newspapers. Conversation is decaying and we are degenerating into unsocial silence. This is not a negligible danger. Man's chief duty – his unending duty – the proper aim of life is to talk. Soldiers fight, statesmen plan, artists paint, poets rhyme merely that they may talk and be talked about. Men live nobly in order to have fine topics of conversation. Books are written not so much to be read as to be talked over. The decay of conversation is a ready-made subject for the critically minded man. The divergence between the written and spoken language is growing wider every day. We talk in a sort of telegraphic slang. No sane man would think of introducing into his conversation the phrases and words of the written language. Very little of the spoken language gets into print. In the end the books will beat the tongues. Already we exchange ideas with printed pages not with our fellow-men- and I foresee the dismal day when even our present emasculated conversation will be superfluous. We shall read our way in silence from the cradle to the grave. VANCE THOMPSON. ---

pygy_ 4y ago

Complimentary sound track by The Divine Comedy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MVESWB1CBg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MVESWB1CBg

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

siftyy 4y ago

Much of the conversation in this thread leaves me a bit sad. Depriving a person a social interaction is some of the harshest punishment given in the US prison system. To assert that instagram, or emojis, or VR is devaluing that in some way doesn’t sit right with me. Even a conversation I might view as “worthless” still gives deep insight into that persons inner thought process. And I’m certain I’d rather have worthless conversations than be deprived of human interaction. Perhaps things are changing too quickly for many people to process, myself included, but overall I’m bullish on new technologies enabling deeper more meaningful connections.

Test0129 4y ago
I can't agree. Except in what I can only imagine are niche communities I have not experienced a "modern" conversation that could match what I would consider social interaction. Certainly you could come up with probably 1,000 counter examples, but from my sample of interactions on discord/instagram/etc (before I got rid of all of it) the vast majority of interactions were parasitic in nature. It was nothing like the forums of yore, pre-eternal-september USENET, etc. There's a reason people are so depressed these days. The social interactions the average terminally online person gets only have a veneer of reality associated to them. You only notice it once you manage to disconnect and compare those interactions to the real world. I've had better conversations with a half cocked patron at a bar than I have had on any given "modern" avenue of communication. No amount of technology will ever surpass actual human connection until our forebrains permanently melt away. At the end of the day we are constantly trying to "connect better" when the answer is, unironically, to simply go outside.

kstenerud 4y ago

The articles in this paper sound an awful lot like letters to the editor: Trite complaints about non-issues and "old man's worries" about the kids today. With the conversation article itself, the complaints he raises are overblown even looking back at it now. I've lived in many countries and traveled to many more, and one thing I've always taken note of is how and when people hold conversations: it depends almost entirely upon local culture. You're much more likely to have conversations with strangers in the countryside than in the city. You're FAR more likely to have a conversation with random Portuguese than with random Germans. Traveling Japanese are far more interesting and open than Japanese at home, whereas the opposite could be said of the British. The Vietnamese keep to themselves whereas Cambodians are happy to meet strange people. People are far more friendly in Lyon than in Paris. San Franciscans are far more likely to talk at you than with you (even vs just across the bay in Oakland).

user_named 4y ago
Your comments are on point an match with my experience. I'm currently in China and I still haven't figured out small talk here. It generally doesn't occur, but sometimes it does. I can't figure out exactly when and why after ten years.

givemeethekeys 4y ago

I wonder if public libraries came along before or after this article was written. I'm glad to see that the spoken tongue is holding up well against, if not dictating, the written language.