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Fortnightly Flotsam: Small Talk, Cheerfulness, Illegal Vodka, the Paragraph, Michoacan
“I liked small talk, so I was a wretched sinner.”
That, anyway, is how I interpreted an early chunk of St. Theresa Avila’s Autobiography. I’ve long had an aversion to small talk, unless I’m drinking. Older people were constantly interrupting me with small talk. I remember waiting for my wheels to get rotated, the dialogues of Plato in my hand (pretentiousness, I’ve never lacked) and a guy came into the repair waiting room, grabbed a cup of coffee, and said, “If it’s free, might as well take some.” It was immediately understood that I was supposed to chit chat for the next 20 minutes. As a young father with zero free time, it was a major annoyance.
I’ve mellowed over the years. I no longer consider small talk the province of borderline morons who want to impose their lack of inner direction on the innocent. I sometimes do, sure, and I still have a long introverted streak that makes small talk as welcomed as Gavin McGinnes in Portland, but I’ve also come to respect small talk as a type of art, which is also the conclusion Joseph Epstein reaches in this 2004 Forbes essay, which, like many Epstein essays, has aged well.
