Stop Talking

One of the pleasures of owning dogs is that they do not talk out loud. They say enough with their tails,(and their eyes) to get their point across. They may bark when the mailman comes to the door with a certified letter one will later regret opening, but barking is their job. They will not bore you to death with it.

I am reading John Berendt's Venice book " The City of Falling Angels", and throughout it runs a river of good talk. Berendt meets a man at the Carnival Ball who may be real or who may be a con. This man claims to be an exterminator. He sells pasta with coumarin in Italy and deadly weiner schnitzel in Germany. "Rats eat what people eat", he tells Berendt, and we are willing to believe because his tale is so fascinating. By the end of it, an Italian woman who had turned her back on the conversation is mesmerized by it.

Perhaps Berendt never meets bores.They do not make it onto his pages. Would the rest of us were so lucky. How I would love to meet someone who would spin a story worth hearing instead of telling me- essentially a stranger- that they are Dual Diagnosis and taking all the newest most fashionable drugs. Even worse their children are on Drug A and Drug B too. "I don't want them turning into lying, drunk, broke bastards like their father", says this woman..

Their father. Her ex-husband. Someone she married of her own free will. Let us now walk out of the room, and talk to someone else. Someone who , in exhaustive detail, will describe her daily commutes between home, work, soccer games, Publix, and little league games. Ah- here is a way to spend an hour far more excruciating than trying to get through traffic on West End in front of Montgomery Bell Academy and the Aquinas campus.

We will leave this room too, and in a hurry. Was it not Alexis de Tocqueville who said that Americans spend all their time contemplating a very puny object- themselves ?

I would rather talk to Vermeer's Geographer, a new man in a brave new world. Note his intensity. He is a man seeing wonders and giving lands new names. Vermeer could paint silence, and one sees it in this wonderful painting.