I admire anyone who can capture the prevailing mood—read the room—in any given situation, with as few words as possible. Here’s a first rate example from Lance Morrow, in the Wall Street Journal, on the final days of the US presidential campaign: “Rarely has history seemed so silly and so ominous at the same time.”

Here’s a great line from Randall Denley, in his open letter to the Ontario Liberal Party in the National Post, on their obvious struggle to score on an open net: “Democracy doesn’t work well unless there are at least two parties offering credible alternatives on important issues.”

This year’s Massey Lecture, by Ian Williams, entitled What I Mean to Say (2024), explores the theme of conversation. It meanders, like a conversation, but charmingly so. I hope the subtle effort to engage some of the previous lectures in the series during the final chapter in, well, conversation, does not go unappreciated.

Here are the two respective passages that I appreciated most:

There is a greater danger in not having the conversation about the state of our world, by which I mean the state of our lives, than in having it. If we don't talk, we risk imagining each other in ways that are self-serving; we use each other as props to confirm our treasured biases, to invent malice, and to scapegoat for social problems. Conversations act as a corrective to our assumptions and delusions.

Our insistence on shoring up identities is constantly setting us in opposition to other identities and turning them to strangers, most neutrally, or enemies, more typically. The psychic exhaustion of carrying identities is pressing us down, depressing us.