Dialogue and translation
"Two Waves" by Makoto Fujimura
If you've been to our house you know we don't have a lot of "modern" art. Our walls have either pictures of our family, landscapes, or portraits (and many of those from the 19th century.) Modern art has been harder for me to connect with, however, the art from Makoto Fujimura I very much enjoy. This piece is inspired by imagery in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, as part of a larger project called "Qu4rtets."
Why do we love to listen to Elizabeth and Darcy even when, maybe especially when, they fail to communicate? Let me suggest two reasons. First, Austen knows, her characters know, and she trusts that her audience knows how polite conversation is supposed to go—that is to say, its conventional topics, locutions, and turn-taking rhythm. Here, however, these two well-bred people fail miserably at it.
We love these characters because they are more than etiquette-book cutouts: Like real people (like us), they fail to find the mot juste, say things they don’t really mean, and sometimes end conversations in dissatisfied silence.
Jane Austen lets the reader judge her characters from their conversations, and her dialogue is excellent because of it.
Speaking of language and translation, I thought this essay by Douglas Hofstadter about learning a foreign language before it's too late is wonderful. After all, the role of language is not only to communicate information the way a computer would, but also:
For me, using language is the very essence of being human. When I speak, I am communicating not only facts, but a way of being. Through my word choices and subtle intonations and tiny hesitations and droll puns and dumb errors (and so on), I am revealing who I am. I am not a persona, but a person.
Constant stimulation is exhausting, and Alan Jacob's posits that contrary to what we might think, we're exhausted because we don't have enough to do. Sometimes it can feel to me like being present in a sea of stimula (e.g., back-to-back-to-back meetings or browsing social media) is actually working, or consuming twitter is work, but really it's alienating me from any real action on my part. Sometimes the better thing to do would be to put the phone (stimulus) down, and go do something.