The Power of Conversation

The Sunset Limited. The subtitle itself is curious. A Novel in Dramatic Form. If you glance at any page, it sure looks like a play, but calling it a play would almost certainly mislead a devotee of the theater. It simply doesn’t have the structure of what you would expect in a play. It is two people talking. That’s it. Just a long conversation. That does not mean a live production of The Sunset Limited would not be worth seeing. There is, in fact, a marvelous HBO production, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones. That is what the industry would call an All-Star Treatment.

The plot, such as it is, is simple. There are two characters, identified only as “Black” and “White.” Black is an ex-con, working class man. White is a college professor. The conversation takes place in Black’s apartment in a run-down New York City tenement building.

Why, you ask, are these two men, unlikely to interact in any social setting you can imagine, sitting in Black’s apartment? Earlier that morning, Black was waiting at a subway station, when White dashed across the platform in an attempt to jump in front of The Sunset Limited as it raced through the station. He accidently leapt right into the arms of Black. Black brought White back to his apartment and the conversation ensues.

Black and White have little in common. Black is a rather devout Christian, who had a moment of conversion after a rather ugly fight in prison left him in the hospital. White is an atheist English Professor who has realized that there is literally nothing good in this world, no afterlife, and thus he welcomes the cold utter oblivion of death.

It is the idea of this conversation that makes this book so endlessly fascinating and rereadable. About 10 pages in, you realize this conversation is going nowhere, that neither man is ever going to be convinced by any argument the other one makes. These are two people with very firm beliefs. They know what they know. McCarthy plays scrupulously fair throughout; neither one ever gets the upper hand and dominates the conversation; neither one is set up as a straw man to be knocked down with the Author’s Message.

In other words, this is not a book to be admired because it proves that the beliefs of Black or White are correct. From the description above, you already feel an affinity for either Black or White, but at no point in this book will you feel like McCarthy has rigged the conversation so your side will obviously win or lose.

What does a book like this teach us? A great many small things and one very big thing. The small things are scattered throughout as the conversation meanders. The Big Thing: Conversation is Powerful.

The power of conversation is not that you might convince someone to agree with you. Sure, conversation can do that sometimes, but if the only goal of every conversation you have is an attempt to persuade the other person you are right, then you will never experience the real power of conversation.

The power of conversation is not that you will enjoy talking with other people who believe the same things that you do. Sure, conversation can be an echo chamber and it is nice to hear your own views echoed back. It can make you feel right and virtuous. But, if you only talk with like-minded people, then you will never experience the real power of conversation.

The real power of conversation comes when you talk with someone with whom you disagree and you know at the outset that nobody is going to be persuaded and you just let the conversation flow wherever it goes. You can’t win a conversation like that. The goal is simply to learn and to enjoy the process of learning. The goal is to experience a mind different than your own and to probe that mind while that mind is probing your mind. The conversation lays bare what you really believe by exposing all the things you thought you believed, but in articulating them to someone who disagrees, you realize that you don’t really believe that after all. The conversation fine tunes your beliefs and forces you to realize what are the non-negotiables in your own mind. The conversation teaches you things and ideas you had never encountered before and constantly shows that the world is a wider and richer place than you ever imagined.

I was about to write “that sort of conversation is dying, if not dead.” But, truth be told, now that I am having this conversation with you, Dear Reader, I realized I am not sure that sort of conversation was ever vibrantly alive. People probably have always tended to talk with people who are like them. The lack of actual conversation is just now more evident when the Echo Chambers have a very loud presence on the internet. Watching people standing in one echo chamber screaming about people living in different echo chambers is terribly dispiriting and depressing and dismal.

The Sunset Limited is this like the light on the front of the titular train. It shines a light into the dark places of the tunnel in which we all live. It gives us the choice to either stand in front of the train or get out of the way of the train. Does life have meaning? Is there a purpose to our acts? Why are you here?

Read The Sunset Limited for the same reason you should enjoy conversations with people with whom you disagree. You’ll enjoy it and you will learn something. I have no idea what you will learn; that is part of the joy of a good conversation and a book like The Sunset Limited.