The following piece by Robert Louis Stevenson just tickles me to read. His insight into human nature is uncanny. Here he describes some of the gymnastics we go through when the timings just right, and we hit on a subject we can run with. I had to read it a few times before I got it all, but worth it.

A good talk is not to be had for the asking. Humors must first be accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and circumstance must be suited; the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the wood. Not that the talker has any of the hunter’s pride, though he has all and more than all his ardor. The genuine artist follows the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a brook, not dallying where he fails to “kill”…..

Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are truly talkable, more than the half of them may be reduced to three -- that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.

Wherever talk may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines.

The theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument; asserts and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and the admiration of his adversary.
All natural talk is a festival of ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the vanity of the other. It is from that reason that we venture to lay ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that we swell in each other’s eyes to such a vast proportion. For talkers once launched, begin to overflow the limits of their ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious, musical and wise, that in their most shining moments the aspire to be. So they weave for themselves with words and for a while inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and theater, where they fill the round of the world’s dignitaries, and feast with the gods, exulting in Kudos. And when the talk is over, each goes his way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, not in a moment, but by slow declension.”

Photo by Richard Mousel