'Tis with the talking of the mature and the responsible that I would pick a quarrel. Particularly if they are well read, unprejudiced, subtle of thought, and precise of language; and most particularly if they are scrupulously just and full of human charity. For when two or three persons of this sort meet together in converse, nothing escapes destruction. The character of third persons crumbles under that delicate and patient fingering: analysis, synthesis, rehabilitation, tender appreciation, enthusiastic definition, leave behind only a horrid quivering little heap of vain virtues and atrophied bad instincts. In such conversations I have heard loyal and loving friends make admissions and suggestions which would hang you in a court of justice; I can bear witness to having in all loyalty and loving-kindness done so myself a thousand times. Nor is this even the worst. For your living human being has luckily a wonderful knack of reasserting his reality; and the hero or victim of such conversational manipulation will take your breath away by suddenly entering the room or entering into your consciousness as hale and whole as old Æson stepping out of Medea's cooking-pot. But opinions, impressions, principles, standards, possess, alas! no such recuperative virtue; or, rather, they cannot interrupt the discussion of themselves by putting in an appearance.
Now, silent thought, whenever it destroys, destroys only to reconstruct the universe or the atom in the thinker's image; and new realities arise whenever a real individual creature reveals his needs and ways of feeling. But in what is called _a good serious talk_ there is no such creating anew; nobody imposes his image, no whole human creature reveals a human organism: there is merely a jumble of superposed pictures which will not become a composite photograph; and the inherent optimism or pessimism, scepticism or dogmatism, of each interlocutor merely reiterates _No_ to the ways of seeing and feeling of the others. Every word, perpetually defined and redefined at random, is used by each speaker in a different sense and with quite different associations. The subject under discussion is in no one's keeping: it is banged from side to side, adjusted to the right and adjusted to the left, a fine screw put on it every now and then to send it sheer into the great void and chaos! And almost the saddest part of the business is that the defacements and tramplings which the poor subject (who knows, perhaps very sacred to some one of us?) is made to suffer, come not from our opponent's brutal thrusting forward of _his_ meaning, but rather from our own desperate methods to hold tight, to place _our_ meaning in safety, somewhere where, even if not recognized, it will at least not be mauled.... Such are the scuffles and scrimmages of the most temperate, intellectual conversations, leaving behind them for the moment not a twig, not a blade of the decent vegetation of the human soul. Cannot we get some great beneficent mechanic to invent some spiritual cement, some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumatic intellectual balls, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creatures may harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies?