To: Small Talk

From: An Acquaintance

Re: Constructive Engagement

12 • 18 • 05

Dear Small Talk:

You may not have time to read this right away; I know you're extremely busy these days. It is a party-laden season, after all. Millions of spouses will rely on you to aid them in millions of conversations with millions of coworkers-in-law. Countless strangers will navigate parties in veritable Popemobiles of you, peering through you as through a (bullet-proof) glass darkly, hoping at least one interlocutor will inspire them to emerge from your lonesome safety and talk about something good.

This year must be especially busy for you, as it's a doubly party-heavy season around here. That's right, small talk: election time. Perhaps only during elections are you summoned to facilitate so many encounters in so many locations across our vast territory. On television, in school gymnasia, and probably in every one of our 2,564 Tim Hortons [sic] franchises, our would-be leaders are never without you: their shield, their crutch, their handler, their jailer.

They say former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell once opined that an election campaign is no time to discuss policy. (This tale is apocryphal, but sometimes a story cries out for its own invention, as in the case of the rumour about Russell Crowe bellowing his own name during sexual intercourse.) Whatever the Rt. Hon. Ms. Campbell said in the season of her electoral undoing, a campaign is indeed no time to geek out on the nuts and bolts. Campaigns are a time for you, small talk--you who manage to be at once studiously uncontroversial and relentlessly topical. You're much like booze and fatty foods: we say we don't really want you but if a party gives us anything else we get very scratchy.

And just as an election is no time for serious policy debate, a meeting of two strangers at a cocktail party or a conference is no time for the laying bare of souls. Just because we happen upon another piece of flesh, as helpless before a silent God as we, doesn't mean we have to get all intense about it. Other people who could do a whole song and dance about how they came to be standing before us at this event, in these clothes, speaking a language, with certain tics and neuroses, friends and enemies, and probably a favourite colour--well, these people are a dime a dozen. Annie Dillard writes, "There are 1,198,500,000 people alive now in China. To get a feel for what this means, simply take yourself--in all your singularity, importance, complexity, and love--and multiply by 1,198,500,000. See? Nothing to it."

But seriously, small talk, I know we can't probe the neuroses and favourite colours of every stranger we meet any more than our leaders can tell us what they really think on the 6 o'clock news. Even if time permitted such probes, we would prefer to keep our hands to ourselves: neuroses are creepy and favourite colours are boring. We can scarcely bear to know ourselves and our intimates so well. But still...one rarely walks away from a conversation about the weather feeling much edified or nourished.

As you may have begun to detect, small talk, I feel not a little ambivalent about you. You have your part to play, but I can't decide whether you are an aid to real conversation or its evil usurper twin. Maybe if honest talk is a Greyhound, you are the bus station. We only spend time in you because we're hoping to get somewhere else. It's true that it's nice to have somewhere out of the weather where we can hang around if the connection we want is delayed. But you have to admit: if we ever get anywhere in conversation, we get there by leaving you behind.

Your problem, I think, is that you deal in shared experience (usually a good bet) but only in its most banal form. You insist that we say things we are 99% sure total strangers will be able to grasp and reply to without confusion, offense, or undue intimacy. You make me ask: "Oh, are they good? I've actually been looking for a dry cleaner near here." What I really want to know is: "Do you, Total Stranger, ever think about the endless cycle of dropping off and picking up dry cleaning, and momentarily contemplate suicide? Do you feel it's possible, in the long run, in a spiritual sense, for a person to survive in the face of dry cleaning?"

I was once among some middle-aged men who were discussing with a somewhat younger man the impending birth of his first child. You made them say, "Say goodbye to sleep, my friend." "Things are sure going to change, but you'll do fine." "Which hospital are you planning on?" And then one of the men who already had kids said simply, almost to himself: "I was so surprised. I never knew I could love someone so much." The others nodded without speaking. It could not have happened without you, small talk, but how stingy you seemed by comparison.

Every once in a while we're able to skip right past you: as when we overhear friends talking on a train. Having not purchased it through you, we have no right to these strangers' frank talk. We just get it for free second-hand. Mobile phones are powerful tools in this regard. I once heard a woman saying in a near-shout on a crowded streetcar, "THAT IS SOMETHING I WOULD NOT DISCUSS WITH FRIENDS. THAT WOULD BE BETWEEN ME AND MY SEXUAL PARTNER ONLY. NO ONE ELSE NEEDS TO KNOW WHETHER I DO THAT. I AM A VERY PRIVATE PERSON." On another occasion I heard an elegant-looking woman yell across the street at a man walking briskly away, "I hate you, you ignorant fucking prick. I used to love you. Now I hate you." I have thought of that longer and more often than all the cocktail party chats I have had in my life.

Of course, small talk giveth and small talk taketh away. For every freebie you give us--for every time you step aside to give us a glimpse of a stranger unmediated by your translucent beige curtain--you exact a cost at the other end. There is perhaps nothing more sorrowful and alienating than having to make small talk with someone who used to be close and is no longer. If there are raw feelings lying around, it is remarkably hard to find everyday topics unconnected to more volatile ones. And if there is no longer any emotional minefield to navigate? Even worse. The drifting, generic conversation is more painful still, as you realize this former intimate could be Elizabeth Dole for all the context you now share--and so could you.

Which harrowing thought brings me to the thing I wanted to tell you. Small talk, I am decidedly not Elizabeth Dole. And I think I would like to place a personal moratorium on my participation in conversations that might ever be in danger of obscuring this fact. Therefore, I'm going to try to spend less time with you from here on. I thought I'd let you know in advance because I suspect we'll run into each other at some parties over the next few weeks, and I don't want you to feel slighted when I avoid you like poison oak. It's not that I'm ungrateful--I know you've helped me out plenty of times and I won't have an easy time letting go. It's just that, well, there are 1,198,500,000 people in China and I don't know how a single one of them really feels about dry cleaning. There is no time to waste.

Until we speak,

An Acquaintance