Can we please stop fighting? The benefits of assuming a friendly audience—

The Art of Whispering

by Steven Harvey

Whether we say sweet nothings in our lover’s ear or offer up a prayer to the sweet nothing of death, we whisper our most important words. So I was distressed when I flipped through the pages of my first book of essays to find that I didn’t use parentheses at all. What—no secrets? No titillating asides? Surely I’m not such a punctuational skinflint that I cannot afford to fold in a hushed word or two—just between you and me. After I thought about the missing marks of punctuation, I came to realize that the absence made sense.

The personal essayist is given to writing sentences freed of parenthetical remarks because everything in the personal essay is said in whispers. The personal in personal essay is a reminder that the form is about confiding. With it we disclose our dreams, admit our beligerence in the pursuit of gifts, and pull back the curtain on our family life. In the pages of a personal essay I set down my coffee cup, lean toward the reader, look to my left and right, and whisper a truth in confidence. The hush in my voice causes the face on the other side of the page to lean sympathetically in my direction as well. When the shock of recognition sinks in, we both nod. I don’t tell all of course—I’m not a memoirist!—I say only what I have to say to get at some mute truth that lies unspoken in my mind, waiting to be whispered. Sotto voce is inscribed at the top of the musical score of every personal essay, and other forms of literature look, by comparison, as if they were written in capital letters.

What do we do when we are ready to speak the unspeakable? We find a friend and whisper. Personal essayists are lucky because they have the only kind of audience worth worrying about, a circle of friends. Montaigne, the father of the personal essay, began writing after his best friend died. He wanted to keep up his end of the conversation. While at Walden pond, Thoreau had few friends as well, except for us, his readers. And I bet Tinker Creek can get pretty lonely without a reader or two to share the margin.

What does it mean to assume a friendly audience? Friends are good listeners. They get our jokes and wrinkle their brows sympathetically when we complain. If we make a mistake they wait us out and prefer to let us correct ourselves. In general they go easy on us—allowing us to see things our way and even lie a bit as long as the spirit of the shared truth is honored. They have only one immutable requirement, and on this no true friend will budge. We can’t be phony with them. Once we pitch our voice or sound like something we’ve read, we’ve betrayed our friendship by betraying ourselves, and a true friend—patient and forgiving on the whole—will close the book beside the coffee cup and change the subject. As long as we speak our minds—and I mean that in a fairly literal way—a friend will watch our eyes for clues and hear us and give us what we need, the benefit of the doubt.

Knowing that friends agree to disagree, the personal essay does not waste time with arguments. Arguing hardens positions, causing us to sit back in our chairs or push away from the table. Most of the time, the debate is pointless. I remember as a boy lying in bed at night listening to my parents fight. They screamed in fury and broke ashtrays and lamps, and when the yelling was done the silence after the curses brought me out of bed to the top of the stairs to be sure that they were all right. I can see the tableau even now. My dad, his sleeves rolled up facing a wall, fist clenched, my mother sitting bent over in a kitchen chair with her back to him, mascara running down her cheek. It would take a long time for their shouts to become whispers again. These days, their fights remind me of my country.

Personal essayists steadfastly refuse to argue. Like the highschool band for a losing football team, they may not win the game, but, without scoring a point, they can win us over—simply by ringing true. When a thought ‘rings true’ it does not matter if the idea is right or wrong according to the lit scoreboard of some abstract ideal. What counts is that the words resonate harmoniously with the world as we have come to know it. The goal for essayists like me—who off the page are a dull lot by and large—is not to light up Friday night, but let their words sink in on Monday morning. Rather than frame a position for us to take, they shape language to fit our experience so that we find ourselves already in the frame.

Personal essays may not introduce us to something new, but they can cause us to ponder who we have long been, and such writing is, I think, one of the few ways to change minds. Arguments may hoist our thoughts, like a Hail Mary pass, to the buzzer of some unforseen logical conclusion, but words that merely ring true lineup along the gridiron of our assumptions muscling our lives forward three yards at a time. If it wins over a reader, it does so by ringing true—a higher standard, the standard our friends hold us to. When we can’t get on friendly terms with God, we can lean toward each other, and the personal essay—sometimes called the familiar essay—can help. Rising parenthetically in our cupped hands, its pages can illuminate night with a kindly dark and fill the windows of the lonely with comforting glow.