The Prices of and Time for Everything Sept. 18 ’86
Original title: Love is the effort we make listening to chatter.
Sub-heading: Are tooth brushes cheaper in Paris?
Our next-door neighbour in Tokyo didn’t come to see us next door often, never overstayed and squeezed as much useless information into an hour as most people would manage in a lifetime of conversations.
It always seemed to me that George had missed his vocation. He should have been a check-out person in a supermarket, or a book-maker, or an adding machine, or anything that allowed him to quote prices incessantly, to compare and contrast tariffs, to give the times of buses, trains and planes. He should have been an electronic timetable at Kennedy Airport, or a visual display unit in Nomura Securities Tokyo Office, or an auctioneer at Sotheby’s, or a human stand-in for AI Chat. Anything that utilised his extraordinary penchant for accompanying every event in his life with a price or a time.
I had not seen him for many months, and I knew he had been on holiday the past couple of weeks. I was keen to hear about his trip to Western Europe and London, and, fond hope, to share with him, some of the joys of overseas travel. He was American but had lived in the Far East for over 30 years and had only recently discovered the charms of the Old Country and France.
He came in, a torrent of figures. My face and spirits sagged. I girded my loins and decided to keep on my feet at least for the first five minutes to give myself the chance of doing something interesting rather than just sitting wanting to nod off. Sometimes the “Ah, hahs”, the “Oh, reallies” and the “How wonderfuls!” flow easily. On this occasion, faced with a stream of events, such as missed and caught public transport, free days at museums, the cheapest coffees in town, the times of breakfast, lunch and dinner, the comparative prices of tooth brushes in London and Paris, and handy hints on how to beat the exorbitant tariffs for hotel rooms and at their restaurants, I sensed I was up against the proportions of a sumo wrestler in terms of garrulousness. I estimated it would be an hour in which I would scarcely stay awake, hardly get a word in and run the gamut of strategies on how to continue showing even a modicum of interest.
People of sterner stuff may say “Ah, but all you have to do is keep moving, go to the kitchen saying ‘I’m staying listening, very interesting, keep going’ or clearing one’s desk unobtrusively, or picking stuff out of the teeth and eyes and ears, or practising Zen meditation with eyes transfixed on the statistics juggernaut. All these tricks have been tried. They don’t work. He keeps talking. You resolve and change nothing, you just continue to feel hopelessly left out of what you had hoped might be a conversation.
I sat down, reaching for my drink and cigarettes, the greatest of friends in this listening marathon. I’d always believed that after a time even speaking alcoholics (No, maybe just “speakers”) intuitively come to realise that their listeners had internally haemorrhaged under the pressure of boredom, that they had fallen into a deep sleep with the eyes propped open with imaginary stancheons, or that they having changed seating position some 50 times must be in need of being allowed to contribute something to the list of statistics.
No, as I hinted, fond hope. Not this speaker. He was a long-haul number cruncher; he could put out stars light years away with ticket price deliberations; he could quote page references and give the number of words in classic plays with a breakdown of the number each character spoke; he could miss the opportunity for general descriptions of hotels but never missed a statistical beat when it came to dinner menus. He could get into stride on hotel and restaurant menus but seldom rose to a description of the establishment far less some interesting going-on there. “Now wait a minute, back up, back up! Was it 65 pounds or 60? Had it been increased? Across the road the same kind of place had pushed their double room prices up by five pounds. No, no, it was 10 pounds, now that I recall.”
Even in the pauses when I could have injected some appropriate comment, I didn’t feel like it because it would have given rise to a new set of prices and times even more elaborate and ponderous with detail as the speaker stops often to recall exactly this or that price, time, date, shop, or whatever, as if his listeners really needed such detail.
(Added to July 31’04 in Pouzolles on an evening of heat not unlike Tokyo evenings when our neighbour would come in for a chat.)
It supplied me with the truth of “The devil’s in the detail”, or should that be “The truth is in the detail”? Oops! Well, I must say I’m amazed to come across this old piece of writing, something dashed off after a particularly boring visit. I express surprise because it could have been written again more recently after any one of dozens of visits to us by Tim in the cottage on our property, another American it has to be said. The one thing George and he have in common is a constant stream, but they diverge in content in that the former’s is everyday statistics, the latter’s is historical, medical and family data. It’s a double whammy when confronted with this kind of thing insofar as you feel bored and then upbraid yourself for feeling that way. You have a suspicion that you should be a more interesting person able to contribute no matter what the subject matter, or you should be a kinder person who is able to put up with the torrent of stuff.
Maybe the bottom line is none of us is able to do the simple thing and just redirect the flow the way we want it to go. It has something to do with too much effort and too many real and wonderful conversations with others in our lives, so we don’t believe we should have to make that kind of effort with anyone.
I eventually found ways to direct George’s stream by interrupting and interjecting with other topics which I was interested in, because he really was an interesting person when moved off the banal statistics and he was a loveable soul, providing superb material for a book.
For more on George, see “An American Interviewer in Tokyo” (Fine Line Press).