As you wander, let yourself fall down rabbit holes, and trust in what intrigues you. For in the end, what will illuminate this newly acquired knowledge — and make cocktail-party conversation fun, rather than a numbing act of recitation — is the unique bend of your mind. Keep in mind, too, as you make the rounds of all those cocktail parties, that often the people we think of as the best conversationalists are in fact the best listeners. In this age when so much seems to revolve around declarations of self and peacocking on social media, listening can be a radical act, a pause in the compulsive narration of our own lives to enter into the consciousness of another. In the British writer Rachel Cusk’s recently completed “Outline” trilogy, the narrator is less a character than a conduit, passing on the stories shared by the strangers around her, and in doing so creates a portrait of an anxious, uneasy world (and, slyly, almost incidentally, of her deepest self).

Source: New York Times December 06, 2019 07:52 UTC