Silence week 1

I know.  The pursuer of the virtue of silence who doesn't post all week on her blog is a startlingly earnest joke, which is to say a bad joke. 

What Franklin wished to avoid in courting silence / avoiding the trifling was in fact confusing to me at first, even if my long solo work hours tended to moot it for much of the week.  My only opportunities for conversation were when T. came home from work, and truth be told, we both enjoy conversation that jumps abruptly (and sometimes with little explanation, so he tells me) from the serious to the trifling and back again.  From my point of view, the two injunctions – "Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself"; "Avoid trifling Conversation" – were thus, in the light of happy cohabitation, partly at odds.  Some of those trifles are beneficial!  Franklin had a happy marriage, and I expect that he may have exempted his domestic world from some of the more onerous of the virtue requirements. 

But perhaps not.  Throughout his Autobiography, Franklin reminisces about social engagements that he tended to want to turn to rhetorically and philosophically improving activities.  A boyhood friend and he communed by arguing about "the Propriety of educating the Female Sex in learning, & their Abilities for Study."  They enjoyed attempting to confute one another, exchanging written arguments on the subject, writings which stirred Franklin to perform extensive private exercises to improve his style and rhetoric, since the other boy was at first a better writer and had the upper hand.

Or there is the social club Franklin formed in Philadelphia, a secret society called the "Junto," formed for "mutual Improvement."  Franklin's rules for the club had each member posing questions on morality, science, and politics, and writing an essay to present to the group every three months.  Not a hedonistic bunch!  To prevent attempts at social domination and to ensure that egos would not be put at risk, another rule forbade "all Expressions of Positiveness [certainty] in Opinion, or of direct Contradiction."  Assert your position too strongly in the Junto, and you would be subject to a fine.

It is a little tiring even contemplating extending such efforts at improvement into every corner of one's waking life.  And yet Franklin's drive to better himself was extremely powerful; to him, ideal social relations would be those that could participate in the programme.

This week I exempted conversations at home from such stringent requirements for even casual talking for the reasons above – domestic intimacy engendered by them seems a valuable end in itself.  I can't justify the cost to congeniality and communion and, since I am less exhilarated than Franklin by the prospect of such focused conversational efforts, I predicted more deficit than benefit.  Perhaps at the next iteration of Silence week I will be more experimental and ambitious.

*  *  *

One of the week's work responsibilities proved a provocative test case.  With the other members of my department, I hosted visiting students who might wish to join our graduate program.  Various events encouraged us to mingle and chat, as well as to expound the resources we offered more rigorously in more formal settings.  An introvert, I find the less scripted of these events (receptions, group dinners, and the smalltalk therein) draining, if not exactly because the conversation in them is "trivial" – indeed the conversation has gotten steadily easier for me to improvise, even in large unfamiliar groups (afterward I inevitably collapse).  I was amused watching Franklin's principles collide.  Promotion of one's office, business, or community is a highly valorized activity for him.  Here it was achieved in part through being diverting, that is, through diverting our attention from our work and "mutual Improvement" proper.  Yet one expects this diplomat and politician was skilled at offering such easy entertainments to those he wished to persuade.  Maybe sober talk at home was his respite.

Here the scorecard of the week: 

Barring the little blot against sincerity, inevitably incurred during one of those recruitment events, it wasn't a bad week for the outlier virtues.  Still, I had more difficulty in what I am thinking of as the the 3 central categories.  This means days where I have a work plan I can't stick to (though often I wind up compensating for a slow start by working until late at night).  The current week is Order week, however ("Let all your Things have their Places.  Let each Part of your Business have its Time").  In theory this would be the most crucial week to date, though my agenda will be challenged by business travel (a conference).  Off to Seattle with the Virtue Project, where my business will have its time.