Dinner Conversation

I’m supposed to be working, but I’m not. I’m sitting in front of my computer thinking about Jane Austen. I’m thinking about her wonderful characters, her brilliant style.
"Some books are so familiar reading them is like being home again."
That quote reminds me of Jane, but it’s not Jane’s quote. It’s Louisa May Alcott. Another of my heroes, or should I say heroines?
I have wondered upon occasion if Louisa May Alcott ever read Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice would have been about thirty years old when Alcott was a teenager. We know Louisa was an avid reader, but I’m not sure if she had time for novels. With Emerson living across the street and Thoreau down by the pond, one might have to expend considerable amounts of time on the classics just to keep up with the dinner conversation.
Wow! I like that image. I’m picturing my back deck, cooking a few chicken breasts or lamb chops on the grill as a couple of America’s greatest philosophers sip wine and share thoughts about transcendence or the natural law of compensation. Now that would be an interesting evening.
When we have friends come over, the conversation goes through all kinds of highs and lows. We talk about family, school, the price of gas, whether the Spurs can win the championship next year and what are we going to do about that woman down the street who walks her poodle into our yards to poop.
As the night gets later and the dishes are cleared off, the talk might drift into less mundane discussion. Is it right to push the homeless into certain neighborhoods? Should people who don’t recycle pay more for trash pick-up? If you can’t make a college education free, can we at least make it equitable?
Of course, none of us are great minds, or if we are no one yet knows. But then being a great mind is not usually something we know about people in their lifetimes. Sometimes we do. Leonardo DiVinci and Benjamin Franklin were famously brilliant and everybody knew it. Even Alcott, Emerson and Thoreau were well-known and respected in the time that they lived.
Jane Austen was not.
I was in England last year and did some Jane Austen travel, including the museum in Bath. I also visited Winchester Cathedral where she is buried. Her grave marker in the floor says something like: Jane Austen, beloved daughter and sister. On the wall nearby a plaque was put up, many years later, identifying her as THE Jane Austen, Authoress. She died before the true genius of her work was known. People undoubtedly talked to her at the fish mongers every Thursday with no clue that she was the greatest literary mind of her generation.
All my friends are smart, interesting people. They are all capable of what Jane might call "elevated conversation". I don’t know if our discussions are as interesting as those that took place in the dining room of Orchard House, but they are interesting to me.
I think I’ll go thaw out some chicken and get on the phone to see who’s up for some philosophy grilling.