he patisserie near my house has a sign: “No, we don’t have WiFi. Talk to each other.” When you sit down at one of their tables with your coffee and pastry, you actually do see people in conversation, which makes for a nice change from Starbucks, where you can work on a laptop for hours and never make eye contact with another human being.
It’s become almost a cliché for people to describe how they went out to restaurant and saw a whole family – father, mother, children – sitting together at a table, each preoccupied with his or her smartphone. This upsets people, almost as a kind of reflexive response.
“We’re losing our ability to have meaningful conversations,” a friend told me not too long ago. “Look at the nasty comments you see online. Most of those things a person wouldn’t have the guts to say directly to another person’s face.”
Although I think that most of us approach technology with good intentions, it’s disconcerting when we realize how much we let it take over our lives. Technology can distract us with all those bells and whistles from recognizing its limitations, and this is especially true when it comes to maintaining relationships.
I honor the patisserie’s owners for metaphorically yanking the smartphones out from under their customers’ noses and forcing them to socialize. The conversations that result may be serious or trivial, but I can bet that they involve storytelling of some kind – because that’s what real conversation is all about. Everything else is just noise.
Think about it: if you work a job outside the home, there’s a good chance you talk to a lot of people. How many of those conversations do you remember in detail? If you’re home a great deal, especially if you’re a freelancer or retired, you can go through your entire day without a single genuine conversation. Social media doesn’t help much — in fact, it can make it worse, especially if silence greets your tweets and Facebook posts, and you start to feel that peculiar loneliness unique to users of these forums.
I’ve been thinking about this lately as I’ve been remembering a period, more than 10 years ago now, when I lived in Venice, Italy. It was an interesting but not especially happy time of my life – Venice is an odd city, crammed with tourists but short on residents, and it’s easy to grow lonely there. I worked very hard during those months to meet people, and over time got to know many American and English ex-patriates, visiting scholars, Italian “foreigners” working or studying in the city, and even a few Venetians. I had conversations in English and Italian. Some were long, but most were short. Yet even after all this time, I remember them.
Most conversations started outside. I might be walking through a piazza, and would run into someone I knew. We’d go grab a quick expresso or a spritz and catch up — by telling stories. “The other day, I was . . .” “Let me tell you about this trip I took to . . . ” “Did I ever tell you about the time . . .?”
There were meetings with strangers, too. Sometimes I would come across a shop I’d never seen before and strike up a conversation with the owner. I met wonderful people in Venice that way: a stampatore named Gianni Basso, who works in a tiny shop on the Calle del Fumo and makes gorgeous calling cards and stationery on 18th Century printing presses. Another was Paolo Olbi, a renowned leather worker and bookbinder. Both men told me many stories of their work, and both worried that they would have no one to pass their craft on to.
All these conversations were face-to-face. They also took place in vivid surroundings, which still remain as much a part of my memories as the people with whom I was speaking. I can’t do this sort of thing where I live now, and my social life suffers for it. When you live in a city like Venice, with narrow walkways and no cars, people become a regular part of your days. No need to worry that you haven’t talked with so-and-so for weeks; no need to check your book to see if you have a free evening to get together with a friend. American life has lost much with suburban sprawl and our tendency to cocoon.
Lately I’ve been grateful for the time I’m spending with my aging parents. I have them over for dinner often. I meet my father for lunch and spend at least one day a month with my mother at that patisserie I mentioned. Among other things, I’ve been encouraging them to talk about their childhoods, thinking that I will record these recollections into a notebook.
While I have strong memories of my parents at nearly all stages of my life, I’m aware that memories are being made now, and that one day I will look back on these late conversations as unbearably painful and sweet times, because they were the last.
This is what conversation does for us. We tell stories all the time when we talk together, and learn something as we go along. Stories shape who we are – not just the stories we live or hear first-hand, but the stories we read.
I wanted to start this blog off by acknowledging the importance of conversation, and how it is the foundation of all storytelling. It’s not for nothing that when we think of the word “tale,” the mind jumps to ideas of people gathered around a fireplace; of mysterious old men beckoning to travelers in an ancient marketplace; of that particular kind of conversation that in Arabic is known as samar, when lovers talk in the night and tell stories. (By the way, if you didn’t know that word, it’s a lovely one to remember.)
Here, then, is another call to turn off your devices and talk to each other, because real conversation is infinitely more interesting.
“Let me tell you a story . . .”