Three-part blog on why I feel better already and it’s only the first day of Spring Break

Pt.1 We talk because we don’t have time to pick nits
I spent the afternoon reacquainting myself with the feel of paper and the smell of ink. It’s been a while since I went through the literary mags at Borders (this is my periodic check-in to reassure myself that the published essays aren’t nearly as brilliant as the ones in my head, waiting to be written—only this time they were and so that was kind of a low point in the afternoon).

One essay was especially appealing (in the same ways as yesterday’s story on European identity in the Times was appealing, see post March 11—I feel myself much aligned with the subject matter and the conclusions). Diane McWhorter (who is no mere essayist – having already walked off with a Pulitzer Prize) wrote a sage piece about the value of “talk” (this is in the American Scholar, which does have a website, but today is paper day for me)—the conversational kind of talk.

I have to cite this one brief paragraph, which actually is a summary of Robin Dunbar’s Darwinian-like thesis on the origins of talk. She describes Dungar’s point thus:

Language was the evolutionary continuation of the grooming behaviors of our primate ancestors. The social cohesions essential for their survival flowed from the emotional bonds established by the obsessive intimacy of nit-picking and fur-raking. As the size of animal groupings grew, however, social management became trickier, and the amount of grooming time needed to grease the system (up to 50% of a primate day) began to interfere with the basic survival activities of gathering food and defending against predators. So humans evolved in such a way as to vocalize those rituals of emotional maintenance, which freed them to attend to other business simultaneously. And voila! –multitasking. Thus, through talk, are we h. sapiens able to massage the body politic while shelling peas on the porch.

McWhorter, who no longer worries that she is always the last to get up and leave parties, says a friend gave her his blessing for her constant quest for talk. He told her “There’s plenty of time for silence. Talk away.”

I suppose blogging and emailing are the next evolutionary steps (now that shelling peas on porches has gone by the wayside and coffee-house culture isn’t what I remember it to be), though they’re ones that push us even further from the obsessive fur-raking and nit-picking that were the hallmark of bonding. Ah well, one takes what one can get.