A great friend of mine from high school recently set off to spend two years overseas serving in London as a Mormon missionary. I’m not Mormon myself, so I admittedly wasn’t too well-acquainted with the idea of a mission or how exactly it all works. But suffice to say that, while mission-ing, communication is quite limited. To counter that and keep in touch, we’ve taken to writing letters to each other.
It may be surprising to some, due to the fact that written correspondence has to withstand a lengthy wait for any form of response, but the letters we’ve exchanged thus far have been nothing if not chock-full of fantastic conversation. We’ve talked about politics — domestic and international, and why we favor hearing about one over the other — about travel, about religion, about loneliness, about histrionics and about poetry.
This line of conversation started when my friend quoted Alfred Lord Tennyson while discussing the things they would miss the most from home. It was a line from a poem Ted Kennedy cited in a 1980 concession speech: “I am a part of all that I have met … though much is taken, much abides.” And I, perhaps understandably, was left reeling from — and totally taken by — those words.
From there, we kept talking about poetry. In my next letter, I attached some William Butler Yeats poems we were studying in my Modern Poetry seminar, and in the resulting written back-and-forth, we exchanged brief interpretations of the poems that also fittingly applied to the letter’s remaining content. After reading a verse about “self and soul,” I questioned what it meant to be alone, asked how much time he spent with others as opposed to on his own thus far on their mission. He tied a poem’s discussion of World War I — the “zeppelin and the aeroplane” — back to history, said how much he missed an academic environment and being constantly surrounded by questions, by answers and by more questions.
Perhaps this sounds pretentious to some, but reading and writing these letters, it never seemed that way. In fact, what it seemed like — what is was, what it is — was good conversation. Talking, for real. No filler, no fluff — just what means something.
I don’t know too many people who can quote Tennyson. Hell, I can’t quote Tennyson and I’m an English major. So I am by no means suggesting that in order to have good conversation, everyone run to their nearest bookstore and pick up a copy of The Norton Anthology of Poetry and get to memorizing every last, lyrical line. But somehow, some way, Tennyson served as a springboard to some of the best and most comfortably revealing conversations I’ve ever had, conversations that I can quote back to others and that I return to when I need a pick-me-up. And that’s the kicker of it all — these aren’t even true, face-to-face conversations. They’re essays, they’re letters. They’re written, they’re words.
But these letters have gotten me to re-think how I communicate with people and how I fill my real, face-to-face, everyday conversations with either meaning or fluff. How much time do I spend talking about people — about who-did-what, how-they-did and what-did-who — rather than about places, events, and ideas? How much time do I spend inadvertently gossiping and gaining through-the-grapevine “knowledge” when I could be talking about experiences and gaining legitimate worldliness?
That’s not to say that quick, hi-how-are-you’s should be removed from my — or anyone else’s — daily routine. There’s a time and place for that. What I’m talking about are the sit-down conversations, the real deals, the getting-to-know-you’s and the catching up’s. How often do we fill those with meaningful words and intriguing topics? How often do we not?
I’ve found myself asking these questions while walking away from many recent conversations. Granted, when you’re with good friends, these types of deeper, more meaningful discussions happen more regularly, more easily. I’m lucky to have a handful of great conversationalists in my life. But having gotten such a satiating taste of good conversation through these recent letters, I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if I encountered this kind of deep and challenging discourse on a daily basis.
Of course, there’s something inherently formal about a letter, about sitting down and swearing to yourself that the time you spend with pen-to-paper won’t go to waste. You’re more likely to think out your thoughts this way, more likely to be intentional with your wording, more likely to sign off feeling as though you’ve said something worth saying. It’s understandable that we don’t get this feeling after every conversation; I’m not saying that we should, but it’s a tempting thought. Give a mouse a cookie, and they’ll ask for milk; give a person a good conversation, and they’ll be hooked.
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