`More Fun Than Knowing'

I had lunch recently with eight pleasant people, most of them my age or older, most of whom I didn’t know. My usual strategy to avoid engagement with strangers is to remain quiet but to say something funny when silence would be rude. Earnestness in such a setting is usually tiresome, and while I find the lives of other people interesting and strange beyond reckoning, my life is of little interest even to me.

One man asked what I thought about the language used by American journalists to describe democracy or its absence in Mexico. I know what he was getting at – media hypocrisy, Doublespeak, condescending to the Third World, etc. – but I have never visited Mexico, have no interest in doing so, and know almost nothing about the country. And that’s what I told him: I don’t know enough to offer an opinion worth listening to.

I hope I wasn’t rude. The exchange – or rather, my part of it – still bothers me. An axiom of polite conversation is that when asked a question it’s imperative to say something, and ignorance is not an acceptable excuse. I’ve had almost a week to think about this, and I know what I wish I had said, but now I have others who can say it better. Here’s the Irish essayist Hubert Butler, from “Beside the Nore,” collected in Escape from the Anthill:

“I have always believed that local history is more important than national history. There should be an archive in every village, where stories…are recorded. Where life is fully and consciously lived in our own neighbourhood, we are cushioned a little from the impact of great far-off events which should be of only marginal concern to us.”

I have often wished I could speak the way W.H. Auden wrote. It would save a lot of time and make me appear more intelligent than I am. Here are four stanzas from a late poem, “Archaeology,” published in Thank You, Fog:

“The archeologist's spade
delves into dwellings
vacancied long ago,

“unearthing evidence
of life-ways no one
would dream of leading now

“concerning which he has not much
to say that he can prove: --
the lucky man!

"Knowledge may have its purposes,
but guessing is always
more fun than knowing.”