Shy Misgivings

As the daughter of a history professor and a retired schoolteacher, and the younger sister to an English teacher and a Guardian night-desker, you'd be forgiven for thinking I have been born and raised with a desire to engage in debate and discussion. You'd be forgiven, but even so, you'd be wrong. I detest debate, and am shy of intellectualised conversations. I don't find pleasure in arguing and even if I do 'win' in a discussion - that is to say I happen to undermine the other person's particular argument - I feel awkward, a little embarrassed and even more convinced that such manners of engagement are redundant. I don't think conversation necessitates having a victor.

That is not to say I don't enjoy thinking deeply about a broad variety of topics: I do. The enjoyment I glean from running, cycling, walking, swimming, drawing, painting, riding around on the tube and listening to songs whilst staring out of the window comes largely from the associative white space these pursuits allow you to fill with deep and protracted thought. I find running wonderfully uplifting but the movement itself is monotonous: I am an able long distance runner not because I am exceptionally athletic but because I see 10km as an opportunity to think deeply and extravagantly. Similarly, I like being silent because when you are silent, you can think. My best friends are people who can bear an absolute and lingering absence of dialogue. To be lost in comfortable thought whilst in the company of another is a rare and special occurrence. A favourite memory of an ex-boyfriend involves our lying silently and companionably for a number of hours on a beach in Sucuraj, on Hvar. When I finally turned to speak, he smiled and said "hello" in a manner so curious, so surprised and friendly, I think he'd genuinely forgotten I was lying next to him. Some may see this lack of dialogue as unforgivably tedious but to me, such moments marked a rare and mutual fondness for our own thoughts.

When it comes to spoken discourse, I like to engage with others through a light reading of popular cultural markers. To me, conversation is a little like a giant jigsaw puzzle - where it is your collective job to find appropriate pieces to attach to the peripheries of the discussion. Conversation can move swiftly or dawdle languidly, but either way, the aim remains the same: to quantify the cultural terrain, to feel you have traversed as much of it as possible, without contention, without rupture. Dialogue that seeks to worry problems, to tease at loose threads, to dismantle before ultimately re-assembling component structures is for me, tiring and fretful. Maybe I am too quick to interpret disagreement as animosity, or something, but actually I don't think it is a question of psychology: I feel it is more to do with a visible model of communication and for me, conversation that boils down to sharing references and prizing agreement provides a cleaner and more productive model of discourse than an essentially Aristotelian approach. My family and I communicate by talking about television programmes, adverts, clothes, food and drink and people we know. We tell anecdotes about places we have been to but they are light and seemingly inconsequential: no one moment of conversation holds any great point or attempts to uncover particular 'truths'. Instead, the meaning of our conversation is greater than the sum of its parts: our dialogue is rooted in the past or in the present tense, it is familiar, it is rooted in the realities of our everyday lives, and we do not debate topics for the sake of their debate. There is little attempt to abstract concepts and work through their logic: with the exception of two topics; sport and film. My brothers will speak at length about football and are happy to make intellectual enquiries into the historical and social contexts of the game. Similarly, my Dad - educated at Oxford, a lifelong academic, a Professor for the last ten years - will only impose critical reading onto film, and even this is done sparingly, and only with people he thinks will be interested. Otherwise, Professor Hill mostly talks about the overinflated cost of things, how his laptop is unnecessarily complicated, or how he should like to acquire a new scarf. He does not foist his academic ability onto people. My Dad approaches intellectualism in the same way he approaches his knowledge of French: it is a separate language, removed from the language of the everyday, a particular type of specialist discourse that is reserved for scheduled seminars and papers at conferences. And, before you wince, avoiding particular modes of academic discourse does not signal a patronising 'dumbing down': because that claim would itself announce a hierarchical view of language that neither I - nor my Dad - subscribe to. To engage in pronounced intellectual debate is not, necessarily, a more profound mode of communication than other, more popular, discursive practices.

What fascinates me about this topic is that until the age of 21, I assumed all families used dinnertime to discuss what the lady in the Post Office had said or how the man at the dry cleaners thought he'd lost his ticket. I thought everybody spoke about the bus ride home, or how there was an idiot on the train. It wasn't until I started visiting the homes of friends that I'd made at Oxford that it dawned on me that other families held conversations in the way we'd been holding conversations in academic tutorials. The Father would carve the meat and say something like, "well, personally I think it was about race" and off they'd all go, debating whether Nachhatar Singh Bola's death was racially-motivated murder or not, and everybody would join in, and become very animated, and it would be clear that a great deal of pride was at stake. And so it would go round the table, everybody squabbling and in high spirits, and they would try to undermine each other, and afterwards, when everybody had settled down again, they'd move onto pudding, as if nothing had happened. But in that moment, in the moment at which the conversation was taking place, it clearly did matter. To everybody. Stuff mattered. Everything was important, and potentially cerebrally interesting, and multiperspectival, and no thing could be taken for granted as being good or bad, because there was always somebody close by who would leap on the opposing bandwagon and contest your opinion. I was disappointed by my own family's aversion to feather ruffling. I craved the constant mental agitation I saw in the lives and relationships of others.

Over the four years since being 21, I have had friendships and relationships that prized dynamic disagreement, been on holidays during which people sat about and talked endlessly about 'issues', and found employment in offices where contentious ideas were regarded as a more vigorous means of achieving progress. I have talked with friends about various current affairs, argued about the benefits of politics and religion, and even picked films apart immediately after exiting the cinema. Now, the idea of family members undermining my every possible assertion or conception seems a draining, exhausting notion. Because in the end, debate for the sake of debate is a false construct - it is a way of communicating that achieves similar ends to not debating. Contesting everything is closely related to contesting nothing, because both models seek equilibrium. I find arguing not progressive but tiring, and also largely pointless - I think personal opinion is born out of a very nuanced ideological framework, one that is very specific to the contextual and biological makeup of the individual, and it is therefore quite difficult to change minds. I don't believe that confrontational analysis is the most profitable approach to discourse, but it has such a long history, and sounds so thrilling, and is married to a rhetoric that is so highly prized in film and television scripts that it is regarded as a far more glamorous mode of exchange than more passive models of discursive intercourse. For me, the most valuable treatment of ideas comes when one internalises them: when a concept is silently quizzed, deliberated over, picked and turned and interiorised and poked at during the quiet process of internal reflection. But you couldn't make a high-grossing, dramatically active Hollywood film about a young-buck lawyer who sit quietly at his desk with his headphones in, listening to melancholy songs as he silently ponders the trivialities of the case. It would lack a certain, argumentative jazz. Thinking quietly - giving in to your shy disposition - is like sucking a boiled sweet on a long car journey: it may not look very interesting, but it can sustain and comfort you for a surprisingly long period of time. Striving for peaceful conversation, peaceful thought patterns, and peaceful discourse will not announce your intellectual capabilities to the world: but it may distract your attention from that world for long enough that your own internal repertoire of thoughts and ideas have a little more room to flourish.