The Half-Life of Conversations

When I conceived of this blog, I had this idle fancy that conversations had a kind of half-life. The idea was this:

When you meet people, you begin a conversation which stimulate (or fail to stimulate) mental connections, ideas, aspects of life that interest you or could be of use. As they continue, you build an internal model of future conversation potential. If it's high, you take a liking to someone; if they're a bore, you avoid contact.
You have more conversations with those you like - some turn out to have more energy than the others you thought you liked, and so on. With each friend or favoured contact, there's a concatenation of conversations that unroll partially based on the perceived half-life of your future conversations.

Even within conversations, some topics have a large 'half-life' - taking a long time before they decay to half their previous potential. Others run out of steam almost before you've begun. They leave you struggling to talk and barely go beyond a single sentence each.

My central example was meeting Emily at the formal at Oxford. Immediately spotted extremely high future conversation potential e.g. literature + california and the us/uk aspects of my life. I couldn't have foretold quite how much I enjoy speaking to her, but from the start her words brought immense pleasure.

However, on further reflection, the half-life analogy is an extremely weak analogy with only a little merit. Here are some criticisms:

1. Bear with me.

EM Forster famously introduced a distinction in novels between flat and round (or rounded) characters. (I should admit to not having read this essay or anything by him.) Flat characters basically have certain mechanical traits, are easily recognisable and add depth to the round characters by juxtaposition. Round characters have complex psychologies, curious relationships with others, more profound narrative arcs and a more recognisably 'human' interaction with the world.

We can immediately see the benefits of the model - especially when understanding the 19th century novel. On the other hand, it's been much criticised - for the obvious reason that Foster's contemporaries, the modernists, and even to some extent Foster himself, messed with the distinction to evoke the actual complexity of lives. Some flat characters later seem rounded, while other rounded characters later seem flat. Or characters seem a mixture of the two.

Yet I can't help but feel that mentally, in order to cope, one has to do this. For instance, there's the guy in the corner shop who you buy something from, and is more a cipher for your purchase than the 'heartbeat of a culture' (as Derek Walcott once described street markets). In some ways, he's a flat character. But your friends - for me, the Alex Ks, Aleks Ks, Laura Fs, Laura Ns, Nick W, Andy B, Theo and Lucas Ws, etc - they're extremely well rounded.

Except at some times - you make judgments about your friends and they're simplified far beyond the full extent of their lives. And to most people, passing them in the street or even encountering them at a lecture, a gig where the band's not the main event for them, a seminar, a publishing house - they're the flat characters.

And although my dad says that most people are boring, even the most boring people must have something interesting about them in order to have lived, and to survive in the ever-changing now. I remember encountering this guy at a bar in Seattle who insisted "I am so boring." The deadpan tone was unforgettable. I asked about his hobbies - "mostly I do nothing. Sometimes I skate. But mostly I'm do nothing. I'm so boring" That to me was really interesting. Yeah he was a flat character, but I guess I'd never encountered something like that part of the Seattle scene before: - where to some, it's second nature to resist modern liberal democracy's insistence we are all 'interesting' individuals.

I have particularly found that while I mostly know who I'm going to have a good conversation with, people I think are boring often surprise me. Just when you'd written them off as a flat character, you strike on a rich seam of conversation that opens up another world on them. There's one girl I know, whose pretty boring if you just attempt spontaneous conversation with her, but choose your topic well and hold to it and she becomes surprisingly interesting. So conversational strategies - even the structure of your thought and expression - can radically alter your perception of an other.

Your dress sense and how/where you encounter someone - what you notice about them - what clue you can pick up as to who they are - these all impinge on the conversational traits, and the level of assuredness in speaking with the other person, that you have with them. What persona you decide to adopt - ach! the list is endless.

Also, life experiences can change who seems interesting and who doesn't - both their life experiences and yours. I remember not finding Alex K particularly interesting until my final year at Oxford. Even then, it wasn't till we spent significant time together in London that we realised what we had in common, a rich conversational potential and our current strong friendship.

And sure to many, I must be flat too. Certainly at classes at law school, I tend to affect less imagination than I have. Although when I can and am in the mood, I let it show. Perhaps it would be better to say that people have flat and rounded sides. Discovering the rounded side can be a tricky task, and by no means worth it - but sometimes it pays dividends.

The linear half-life analogy just doesn't give a good enough account of agency, and our ability to recognise it as something that can be harnessed or adopted.

The remaining arguments are shorter, I promise.

2. We all have on and off days. Some people I seem able to have endless conversations with. But even with them, there are days that no matter what I or they do, we both fail to inject our conversation with any spirit or liveliness. Mood, tiredness, over-exposure to the other, preoccupations and distractions - they all affect how much bubbliness there is to any conversation.

3. Equally, there are people who we have conversations with more frequently just because of the circumstances. We'd rather speak to someone else, but that person is the person available, or the person we have to deal with. And then we just grow comfortable with their conversation, and rather like it, even though with more effort we could be talking to someone else. Anybody who understands Waiting for Godot will get this. It's one of the reasons we feel the play has a point. Sometimes conversation is just for conversations sake. And the theory of drama shows that the art of conversation can be endlessly studied.

4. Finally I suppose commitment to others' imagination changes the game. Perhaps I'm wrong, and some people are doomed to be flat characters to everybody. In our hotel in Washington, every day at breakfast Emily and I heard this Californian guy who we presumed was in DC to lobby on behalf of Israel. And he just rotated the same conversations over and over and over again. No matter where someone was from, it was like - 'Where are you from? How do you say hello in your language? Oh - that's interesting I have to write that down.' Needless to say, he was extraordinarily flat.

Other people become flat through misfortune. Perhaps an extreme is dementia or Alzheimer's. My granny (who has dementia) repeats the same stories over and over again - and while interesting in themselves, they wear down and wear down. What's more, she knows she's doing it but can't help herself.
I, in the fortunate position that I don't have to granny-sit for long periods of time, try to help her out. I ask questions about things she must know about, that I'm very curious about because there's so much missing for me about her life. And mum is always surprised when I find a new story that's still there in her imagination - but she'd forgotten how to access.

Perhaps it's naive to think you can pry imagination out of any person you meet. I certainly want to believe it, but know that there are a lot of people out there where it's like digging for water in a desert. Still I think it's equally naive to totally give up on people when you've barely given them a chance. So much is accident and mood.