26 August, 2007

Why Others Are Necessary

My great insight of the day is that we need other people just to be able to talk to ourselves. And social life is all about personal validation, with a few bonuses thrown in that were never the point in the first place. This thought, perhaps just a momentary and typically cynical fancy, strikes me after reading what Christopher Brookes has to say about Neville Cardus:

One of his favorite conversational adversaries was John Barbirolli. As well as being close friends, they were both great actors and each enjoyed upstaging the other “for the greater glory of God.” At one of their lunchtime meetings, true to form both spent the first hour talking sixteen to the dozen without taking the slightest notice of what the other might have been saying. The occupant of a nearby table recalled that to his surprise and admiration at one point in this exchange Sir John took out his false teeth but still kept talking. By this time Neville was of course a master of the art of masticating and conversing simultaneously....

This excerpt was quoted by Terry Teachout in this post. And I’m not being derisive of Cardus or Barbirolli—I admire anyone who can keep going.