Conversation
The maddening thing about The Age of Conversation is that I've learned that there's a better book on the same subject, by a man whose name begins with the letter A. It is an Italian name, not French. This is maddening because, on the basis of what I've read as references to it, I have to read the other book before I can trumpet any of the insights that Benedetta Craveri's The Age of Conversation inspired.
I was talking with a well-brought-up friend this evening, about Martin Scorsese's adaptation of The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton's third-most-famous novel. We agreed that he had completely missed - I feel that I must invoke the stronger French verb, rater - the lifestyle of the American upper crust. Most people don't understand society, small s or capital - they just take it for granted. But "society" doesn't just happen. Agendas are involved, and some of them are more successful than others. And society's rules are never as silly as they seem to be. How nice it would be if they were! But they're not.
There are two crazy-different things about Western civilization. One, our music is only rarely in unison, instead of always. Which is a clue about the second thing. Second, our women are often complete citizens in their own right. It still hasn't finished even here, that drive for feminine equality. But it is no more advanced anywhere else - the paradox of the United States and the skeleton key to its grotesque conservative twitching.
