TABLE TALK

As a young man I ate plenty of “Table Talk” pies.

They were tasty and plentiful in New England. At the time, my interest was mostly in the contents, not the label printed on the box.

The company’s web site says nothing about the name’s origin.  Historically, conversations around the table have a noble heritage.  Plutarch wrote about the “dinner of the seven wise men.” One of Plato’s most famous dialogues is the Symposium, a conversation after dinner, a time when, as was the custom, drinking of wine and conversing were the central activities.  (“Symposium” literally means “drinking together.”) Martin Luther’s home was a hospitable place where associates would drop in.  Conversations around that table were recorded and published as “Table Talk.”

Food and conversation are associated with that most versatile of human organs, the tongue.  The tongue that tastes and the tongue that talks come together at the table. The novelist Madeleine L’Engle, describing her first date with the man she would marry, highlights the intersection: “Hugh and I sat over our hamburgers and milkshakes till nearly two in the morning.  ..We had talked for ten hours without noticing the time passing.”

Good conversation, like good tasting, requires attentiveness.  Attentiveness, in turn, involves a certain amount of care for, and consideration towards, participants. Distraction, interruption,  and inattentiveness sound the death knell of a good conversation.

Attentiveness and its absence sort of mark the difference between an earlier time (say from Plato to the late 20th century) and ours.  It’s not that humans have changed. but our technology has. Here is a

contemporary image: a table, or it could be a park or a living room; a parent and a child. The parent's attention is given to the glowing rectangle, not to the child.  It's a scene with multiple iterations.

When it comes to the shared meals, L’Engle’s first date would today face challenges:  phone beeps, the

temptation to check texts and emails, instagram, snapchat; to answer a phone call immediately.  The practice of phone use is so common that a word “phubbing” has been invented to describe being snubbed by someone else’s use of a phone.

The problem has occasioned attempted remedies. There is a game in which whoever checks a smartphone picks up the checks for everyone at the table. There is also an invention meant to discourage phone use at mealtime.

Two of our tongues, the tasting and the talking ones, once coordinated quite naturally. The tasting tongue reinforced the talking tongue in fostering affiliations. (And, as with L'Engle, often led to a third tongue, the erotic one).

The link was easy because the table itself symbolized a locus of intersections.  Food comes from somewhere.  Its roots are in the natural world, which, in turn, depends on sun, rain, worms, ants bacteria for fertile soil.  There are also dependencies and connections to those who plant, tend to, harvest, package and ship food, not to mention those who cook and clean up. The table thus offers itself as a suitable place for adding connections by complementing the natural ones with new affiliations centered around conversations. 

This presents a contemporary problem.  Attentiveness, heedful concern, care for others, these rank high in a world where personal categories dominate.  In our world, one which worships efficiency, convenience and control, the older modes of interaction fade to the periphery.

When table talk offers little more than bursts of words between bouts of smartphone concentration, we tend, as Sherry Turkle points out, to lose both vulnerability and the ability to empathize, two important ingredients for interpersonal relations.  

Traditional table talk, combining our tasting and talking tongues, requires us to accept a certain level of vulnerability. Its face to face setting prizes our ability to empathize, that is, to read moods, emotions, responses. 

In the old "Table Talk," dependence, vulnerability, and empathy were much in evidence.  Today, these have been displaced by efficiency, convenience and control--trends reinforced by our technology.  Neither the tasting tongue nor the talking tongue can thrive in this context.