There are certain nights when old friends gather in some dusty sitting room, or new friends on a dance floor speak above trumpets and a walking bass line; other times when two bright-eyed youths clothed in black and white dine with champagne and four courses, or find themselves flung out alone on a back porch like sea shells escaped from high-tide; still yet other times when a room full of barely-acquaintances is by chance divided into cloisters and is already so wearied of exchanging where they go to school and what they might major in and why. These are times of a certain mood, a high-charged mood, one typically fueled by parlor clamor, cocktails, or some lively jazz – or, perhaps, the chance meeting of a group of tired souls who have worn out the routine of their day-to-day conversations and yearn like addicts for an impromptu go at a waltz of wit, a dance that trades under the more prosaic name of ‘talking nonsense’.
First, a show:
He: I never fall in love in August or September.
She: When then?
He: Christmas or Easter. I’m a liturgist.
She: Easter! Huh! Spring in corsets!
He: Easter would bore spring, wouldn’t she? Easter has her hair braided, wears a tailored suit.
She: ‘Bind on thy sandals, oh, thou most fleet. Over the splendor and speed of thy feet –’ I suppose Hallowe’en is a better day for autumn than Thanksgiving.
He: Much better – and Christmas eve does very well for winter, but summer…
She: Summer has no day. We can’t possibly have a summer love. So many people have tried that the name’s become proverbial. Summer is only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It’s a sad season of life without growth… It has no day.
He: Well, what could fulfill the promise of spring?
She: Oh, I suppose heaven would, if there was one. A sort of pagan heaven – you ought to be a materialist.
He: Why?
She: Because you look a good deal like the pictures of Rupert Brooke.*
Utter nonsense, really, but only to the on-looker who is distant from the spirit of the conversation – to those caught up in the dialogue, it is perhaps nonsensical, but only insofar as nonsense can sometimes relate great, illogical truths: things that must be felt, not reasoned. So it is that summer is the least romantic of seasons, something on which both aesthetes and high school hummingbirds can agree. To reason this would be to do nothing other than detail a series of impressions that one gets in summer opposed to what one feels, say, in winter or spring. Skin is smeared and sticky in summer, but frost-touched and covered in wool in winter; dawn is muggy and glaring in summer, yet chillingly fresh and full of suggestions in spring – and so, spring and winter are more romantic. That’s hardly an argument, but isn’t it true?
So it is with talking nonsense. It’s romantic without being forward, witty without being cheap, candid without worry of being pinpointed – it is a dance of esprit and innuendo that thrives on suggestion and wrinkles under examination. The fastest way to kill it is to begin a series of “What if…?” questions, the timeless mark of dull wit. ‘What if Romeo and Juliet fell in love in summer?’ or ‘What if I never braided my hair or wore a tailored suit on Easter?’ are sure-fire ways to step on the proverbial toe of the conversation. It is simply the fact that when that fair Capulet and roughish Montague fell in love does not matter, and likewise that a particular person’s hairstyle on a childhood Easter does not matter. Talking nonsense isn’t about gathering data – or, necessarily, about speaking the precise truth, though the best show of it inevitably touches on more than just the fringes of honesty, be it disguised in the plays of mannerisms or not. The sport is foremost concerned with rhythm; secondly, with surprise; thirdly, with suggestion; and fourthly, with intrigue. It is, in short, completely opposed to earnestness, and, at best, completely of the moment. It is intimate without commitment, and often true without seeming serious.
It is, in short, what almost every conversation past sunset should shoot for.
*dialogue taken from f. scott fitzgerald's this side of paradise.
