Yesterday morning, while I was walking Al, I saw two people sitting on a park bench talking and then at the intersection of Western and Selby I saw a young woman and a young man—the man straddling a bike–talking in sign language. Neither exchange seemed to be an argument; neither seemed to be the elaborated hellos we exchange when we meet someone we know when we’re out and on our way somewhere else. I know this because while I didn’t catch any particular thing said, I scanned tone and gesture. This is a city and strangers in the park can be belligerent. These people weren’t.
Back home, my book club newsletter featured, Stephen Miller’s Conversation: A History Of A Declining Art. This morning's strange irruption of chat is too momentary to be any real refutation of Miller’s book–which, at any rate, I haven't read. But my stroll with Al and the talkers underlined the genre the book belong to, the literature of the wistful retrospective utopia. And that raises the question: what if this is as civilized as we’ve ever been?
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