Conversation! A milieu I love….
Supple sentences with first and second meanings, and others beyond. Outrageous challenges with cleverly planned slip-points, rebuttals with elegant brevity; deceptions and guiles, patent explanations of the obvious, fleeting allusions to the unthinkable…..
As a preliminary, the conversationalist must gauge the mood, the intelligence and the verbal faculty of the company.
To this end a few words of pedantic exposition often prove invaluable. “By an axiom of cultural anthropology, the more isolated a community, the more idiosyncratic become its customs and conventions”. This of course is not necessarily disadvantageous.
On the other hand, consider a person such as myself: a rootless wanderer, a cosmopolitan. Such a person tends to flexibility; he adapts himself to his surroundings with out qualms or misgivings.
His baggage of conventions is simple and natural, the lowest common denominator of his experience. Evincing a kind of universal culture which will serve him anywhere.
I make no virtue of this flexibility, except to suggest that it is more comfortable to travel with than with a set of conventions, which if jostled, work emotional strains upon those who espouse them.
If everything depended upon the quality of ones conventions we would have to examine the so-called quality for its usefulness.
Over complicated, over strict conventions limit a persons life options – much like religious conventions. They confine a persons mind and stunt their perceptions. Why should we even consider a limit to the possibilities to this, our one and single life.
I am not always right – but sometimes I am. Perhaps right in terms of “What is right for me”, in terms of the ends I am trying to achieve. However, in order to be successful, I have to so arrange events that others will be on my side to share my vision of what is up ahead for us.
So as they may be prepared to share the same idea and the task required to achieve and realize that Idea. Which is not always easy. They have to be seduced into believing it – with me.
“In a given set of circumstances – and within a given program of events with a set of architecture and environment whose parameters are known: by proceeding logically, one will observe the development of a pattern, emerging from the seemingly unconnected data. The pattern will have three answers of varying degrees of success. Success. Failure. Dissolution”. In My Fathers House::
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