Enthusiasm

Though I’m deafened by the silence whenever I post something about poetry, hope springs eternal, as some poet once said.

I smiled when I read that sentence on Carmon Friedrich’s weblog this morning. I’ve been there with my own enthusiasms on this weblog (and I avoid the shock of a deafening silence by maintaining a perpetual silence, i.e. by not enabling comments).

It used to be that I would be disappointed when a friend didn’t share my enthusiasm for a food, a literary form, a musical genre, or a philosophy. Sometimes I would end up embarrassed about having gone on excitedly about some such thing, only to be met with a polite lack of interest. Finally I realized that I was behaving like a youth minister, trying to generate passion by being passionate myself (and trying to validate my own passion in the process).

I figured out that it was better to clearly communicate the reasons for my passion for a subject, and to let the listener decide for himself whether my reasons (and my track record for being passionate about the right things) meant he should look into the subject further. This also had the benefit of forcing me to have reasons that could be communicated. Often I had to think far more deeply about why I was enthusiastic—and sometimes I realized that the enthusiasm was superficial or foolish, and gave it up (or at least kept it to myself).

I also learned not to be disappointed when my enthusiasms weren’t shared when I realized how much work it is to pursue a matter aggressively. It doesn’t bother me when a friend doesn’t care for bluegrass or old-time music, because a couple of years ago I didn’t care for it much myself. But I knew it was good music, because many people whose opinions I respected told me that it was. And so I consciously set out to learn to understand the music, guessing that as I came to understand it I would come to love it. Time and again when I would start studying a new artist, the music would leave me cold; but I stuck at it, and the understanding would finally come, and then the love would follow.

You can’t be similarly enthusiastic about every good thing. I know, for example, that poetry is a powerful and time-tested art form, that it can communicate in ways that other art forms cannot, and that much of the best of what has been written and thought comes in the form of a poem. However, I don’t find poetry appealing. I’m sure that would change if I developed some knowledge of how poetry works and spent enough time reading good poems. But since study time is limited, I’ve elected for now to spend it in other areas.

Even though I can’t share all my friends’ enthusiasms, I can enjoy and benefit from the fact that they have them. I love to hear a friend go on about a topic that he is passionate about; I always share in his pleasure, and I often learn something. I listen with pleasure when my wife and daughter talk about sewing or cooking, or my farming friends talk about growing crops or slaughtering animals, or when my writing friends talk about their writing, or when my historically minded friends talk about the past.

And I especially love it when a friend who is thoroughly versed in an area I know nothing about will take the time to think about me and then point me to something specific, a food or a CD/musician or a poem/poet or a book/writer, that he thinks I would be likely enjoy. I usually do enjoy it because they’ve chosen well for me, but I always enjoy the fact that they thought enough of me to take the time to choose something.