A Good Talk Spoiled: Reflection on Conversation

Reflections after an exhausting "conversation" in which my role was more or less that of the wall during a hand-ball game:

There are two ways to have a conversation.  One is a very selfish way, and it's like a golf-game.  In it, each participant thinks they're doing well if they hit the ball of their own ideas and memories and feelings as far as they can.  It doesn't matter what anybody else says or does or feels or thinks.  The 'golfer' could have the same conversation just as well if the other person were a rag-doll.

The other type of conversation is a form of love, and it's like a tennis match.  In it, each person hits an idea, a feeling, or a memory to his partner and waits for it to be hit back.  He watches and listens to the partner intently, and responds to silence not with more talk but with quiet solicitude.  When the ball is hit back, he doesn't continue his monologue like the golfer but instead responds to fact that the conversation is no longer his to do with as he wishes: instead it's a game played with another.

The golfer is wearisome and dull to others: we are no more than an audience for her monologue.  The tennis player is a joy, for she comes to us as an equal.

Self-Query: How would this conversation be different if the other participant were not here, or were somebody else?  If it wouldn't be different much, then I'm golfing.

Comments

[Daisy]

Golf is a depressing sport. People play the game alongside others, but seemingly never with or against them. Opponents serve merely as scenery.

Golfers play on a field of play more beautiful than any other game. And they ignore their surroundings, driving idiotic looking carts across gorgeous startled grass. Self-absorbsion, it seems, often results in a self-inflicted blindness to beauty.

Golf is a game of tradition, manners, and forced quiet, of intentionally caged passion. It values cold calculation, and the acceptable cheat: the mulligan.

Golf does not produce athletes. The better they are, the more the game makes the golfer soft. They mistakenly believe the lie that playing eighteen holes indicates endurance.

There are victims of this sort of violence who suffer silently: the Groundskeeper, ever pruning and planting, changing natural beauty into unnatural symmetry to try to get the golfer's attention, and the caddy, never actually getting to hit the ball even though they often possess more skill than the golfer, but hoping for a percentage of the glory.

People watch golf, believe it or not, and some even like it. But they stand still and say nothing, because they dare not disturb the concentration of the golfer. Truth be told, if it weren't for the money, the golfer would probably prefer they weren't even there.

Tennis, on the other hand, requires a concentration on the opponent; a respect. The tennis court's lines are always at the forefront of the player's mind, and when practicing, the player seeks to place the ball in his opponent's court in precisely the spot where they can not return it, knowing full well that most legal serves can be returned. He is made a better player by the challenge of sending the ball over the net in a new and surprising way.

If you play tennis, you will sweat. You will run. You will breathe heavily. Your arms will ache, your muscles will be transformed. You will eventually be carved into an athlete.

Observers of tennis feel the fairness of the game in their necks as they watch, and though they know they look sort of silly, they watch anyway, applauding. Tennis produces passionate athletes.

[anonymous]

I still won.

[Otter]

Anon,

Nice drive. ;)