The art of conversation is getting others to talk.

A word-spouter from toddlerdom, it took me a while to learn this, half a century or so.

How I used to talk! I wince at the memory of my younger self. I can’t have been as irksome as memory makes me. I conceived of conversation as competitive performance, with admiration the prize. I’d beat rivals with my shtick, vanquish with a quip, a very Zorro with my rapier wit. Look at Carll slash! I can feel interlocutors rolling their eyes: “Man, is he full of himself!”

Where, I wonder, did I acquire this repugnant swagger? From unmerited acclaim I suppose. My skittish parents needed their son to be somebody special. I’m guessing they applied similar pressure to my sisters, but that’s their story. Hot stuff before I was born – “by virtue of office” – my behavior had to prove that premise. Humans see what we want to, our actuality accoutered in the glamor of our possibilities. Lancelot’s boisterous arrival in Camelot pokes fun at such delusions:

Pride is a perilous bequest: a little supplies strength, too much hinders. We need to believe ourselves equal to the tasks of life but not superior. I was way overendowed. “You think you’re God’s gift,” my mother used to chaff, only half-kidding.

Existence fixes pride-addiction, offering its therapeutics without charge, serving crow free in heaping portions. These days I’m teaching Henry not to bark at squirrels: when commands don’t work, I resort to taps, then (most reluctantly) to whacks. He’s a stubborn student, God love him. So I with pride. I’d take my lickings then pop back up like one of those inflatable clowns, convinced of my invulnerability. There was no a-hah moment, only defeats, diagnoses, rejections, a sick kid, love at last, a long strenuous course of instruction. Rome’s saints helped, eventually God weighed in. I’m pleased with my result – though that too is pride.

Humility sees more clearly than pride – from the midst of humanity instead of distortingly from above. Humility embraces life’s gifts instead of caviling at their inadequacy. Humility is happier than dyspeptic pride. Humility is joy-juice – I’m a fan.

Humility perceives what folks seek from conversation, which is to be listened to, not to listen. The ablest interlocutors demonstrate interest in others’ opinions, whether or not they feel it. “What do you think?” is conversation’s crack-cocaine, available for free, though few avail themselves of it.

Listening to others is also easier than showing off: you need only smile, gaze, nod on cue. You also learn stuff – about human nature, speech patterns, the ping-pong of biases, if not the subject at hand. These days, having arrived at ease, I am lazy about my affect. If listening is easier and more amiable than talking, why not?

I must beware, though, the seduction of silence. My sociable mother would blanch at her son’s taciturnity. Why, in conversation, wasn’t I “keeping my end up” – what a “faux pas”! One needn’t say anything worth hearing – controversy was to be avoided at all cost – but one must lubricate others’ talk with one’s own. Gabble too is contagious – in barnyard or parlor.

None of these thoughts are new but they’re worth revisiting. “One of the reasons why so few people are to be found sensible and pleasant in conversation,” observed ever sensible La Rochefoucauld, “is that almost everybody is thinking what he wants to say himself rather than about answering clearly what is being said to him.”

“Polite conversation is rarely either,” snarked funny Fran Lebowitz.