The Art Of Conversation 談吐的藝術(4)

But if British liberals were keen on free speech, they were much less preoccupied than their French contemporaries were with its forms and flourishes. Dr Johnson was considered so great a talker that a contemporary compared his conversation to Titian's painting. But he also could sit stonily silent through a dinner that bored him, or contradict and interrupt in defiance of all common etiquette. Even Boswell, his devoted note-taker, acknowledged his "dogmatic roughness of manner".

但凡英國的自由派對自由演講心存渴望，他們就會在形式（方面）和繁榮（程度）上比法國同時代人少形成一些偏見。Johnson博士被認爲是如此偉大的一位言談家，其會話與同一時代的Titan的繪畫一樣偉大。但Johnson博士同樣也能在無聊的晚餐時分靜如坐石、一語不發，或者違背所有的慣常禮儀，插話反駁，出言不遜。Johnson博士忠實的記錄員Even Boswell認爲他是"作風粗曠、固執獨斷"。

Strong and silent

強力與沉默

Johnson was far from the only Englishman to have matched a love of conversation with a reputation for occasional difficult silences. As he himself said: "A Frenchman must always be talking, whether he knows anything of the matter or not; an Englishman is content when he has nothing to say." In his book "Democracy in America", Alexis de Tocqueville refers to the "strange unsociability and reserved and taciturn disposition of the English". But for Charles Dickens, another foreign visitor to America in the 19th century, it was the Americans who seemed taciturn. He blamed this on a "love of trade", which limited men's interests and made them reluctant to volunteer information for fear of tipping their hand to a competitor. The idealisation of silence remained strong in American culture into the 20th century: think of the laconic heroes of Western films, or of Hemingway's novels.

Johnson遠不只是唯一一個在對言談的喜愛上和常常是艱難的科學上兩者上有着兩項媲美的聲譽的英國人。就像他自己說的："一個法國人必須經常的談論不休，也不管自己對那些事情知道還是不知道；一個英國人則在他無話可說的情況下感到自我滿足"。在他的《美國的民主》一書中，亞歷西斯•德•托克維爾（Alexis de Tocqueville）提及了"奇怪的非社交化、沉默寡言和對英語的興味索然"。至於狄更斯（Charles Dickens），另一位在19世紀到訪過美國的外國人，在他說來——美國人似乎都不愛講話。他將之歸咎於對"貿易的愛"限制了人們的興趣，讓他們不願意自願提供信息，擔心那會向對手攤了牌。在美國文化進入20世紀後，其中的理想化的沉默仍然很強烈：想想西部片裏頭（講起話來）言簡意賅的英雄或者海明威的小說。

More recently it has been neither trade nor taciturnity, but the distractions of technology, which have seemed to threaten the quality of conversation. George Orwell complained in 1946 that "in very many English homes the radio is literally never turned off. This is done with a definite purpose. The music prevents the conversation from becoming serious or even coherent." The television attracted similar comment when it became commonplace two decades later.

最近，並不是或者貿易或者沉默寡言的，而似乎是技術上的心不在焉威脅到了交談的質量。喬治奧威爾（George Orwell）在1946年抱怨到"在許許多多英語家庭，電臺基本上是從來就沒有關掉過。這顯然是有所企圖的。音樂讓交談無法嚴肅起來、或者更加連貫有條理起來"。在20年之後變得普及的電視也受到了類似的批評。

In 2006 an American essayist, Stephen Miller, published a book called "Conversation: A History of a Declining Art", in which he worried that "neither digital music players nor computers were invented to help people avoid real conversation, but they have that effect." A reviewer of Mr Miller's book found it "striking" that past generations would "speak of conversation as a way of taking pleasure, much as a modern American might speak of an evening spent browsing the internet".

2006年，美國隨筆作家Stephen Miller出版了《交談：一種衰退藝術的歷史》，在書中，他擔心"不管是數碼音樂播放器還是電腦，發明出來都不是爲了幫助人們逃避真實的對話，但它們卻起了這樣的作用"。一位評論家在Miller先生的書中發現，他"狠狠的敲打"：過去的幾代人"談到晤談上來時，晤談就像是一種尋找樂趣的方式；那更像現代美國人可能談到的是一整晚都花在瀏覽互聯網上"。

Conversation has survived worse challenges (Johnson thought it might be killed by a return of religious zealotry), and it will doubtless survive more. For evidence that it thrives still, go into any smart New York restaurant, where the noise level will be deafening. Or go into a Barnes & Noble or Borders bookshop and look at the shelves of manuals on how to talk better. Most of them are aimed at people who want to talk more persuasively and engagingly in order to get on in their careers, not at people who want to engage in conversation for the sheer pleasure it affords. But these motivations are far from exclusive. Making friends and influencing people, to borrow the language of Dale Carnegie, amount in the end to much the same thing. Both of them require charm, courtesy and the desire to understand the ideas and opinions of others. And whatever the strategic objective, those will never be bad tactics.

交談從更嚴峻的挑戰中生存下來（Johnson認爲，交談可能被宗教狂熱的回潮扼死），而它也還毫無疑問的活得更好。交談仍然是興盛繁榮證據就是：隨意走進了一家紐約小餐館中，噪音的水平都會高到喧天鬧地。或者你走進Barnes & Noble或者Borders書店，去看一看書架上關於如何更好的談吐的手冊。它們中的大多數都是針對那些只想要自己的事業更上層樓而讓談吐更加令人信服，更加引人入勝的人；而不是針對那些就爲了談話所提供的純粹的樂趣而參與到談話中來人。但這些動機也遠不是唯一。借用Dale Carnegie的話來說：在結交朋友和影響他人這點上，殊道同歸。兩者都要求魅力吸人，彬彬有禮，以及渴求理解他人觀點和主張。而不管戰略性的目的是什麼，總歸不會是個壞的策略。