Conversation: How Talk Can Change Our Lives - Theodore Zeldin
Zeldin is interested in promoting influential, life-transforming conversation: "The kind of conversation I'm interested in is one which you start with a willingness to emerge a slightly different person. It is always an experiment, whose results are never guaranteed. It involves risk. It's an adventure in which we agree to cook the world together and make it taste less bitter" (3). This kind of conversation "changes the way you see the world, and even changes the world" (4). Zeldin then asks an important question: "But how can conversations make so much difference? They can't if you believe that the world is ruled by overpowering economic and political forces, that conflict is the essence of life, that humans are basically animals and that history is just a long struggle for survival and domination. If that's true, you can't change much. All you can do is have conversations which distract or amuse you. But I see the world differently, as made of individuals searching for a partner, for a lover, for a guru, for God. The most important, life-changing events are the meetings of these individuals. Some people get disappointed, give up searching and become cynics. But some keep on searching for new meetings" (4). These kind of conversations have more value than the persuasion of rhetoric - the "bag of tricks which got others to agree and to swoon and to admire, whatever you said" (11). The point of conversation is not to win an argument. The packaging is not more important than the product.