Read From the Top for Free Online Page B

points—just one word, in all capital letters: PRIORITIES.
    I just clicked over and had a look at the current all-capital PRIORITIES list. Thirty-six items. And that’s not including any of the silly ones on the list I just shared with you.
    I’m tired of running behind. It’s time to buckle down. First order of business, keep the word PRIORITIES in all caps, but also underlined and in bold red. Yes. I’ll add it to the list. Oh, and rotate the tires … and tack down that loose shingle … and …
REASONABLENESS
    Back home on the farm the other day a fellow human being and I stood out in the wide open air and conversed at length on a difficult subject. The subject was not resolved, but that was never the expectation. Rather, we wound up marveling at the rare privilege of engaging in a discussion driven by neither rage nor rhetoric.
    These days we are neck-deep in opinionators. The plumber is a pundit and your aunt is Tweeting talking points. ’Course, anytime I use the phrase “these days” I am revealing my own creeping codgerism, a condition encroaching on my soul at a rate corollary to the recession of my hairline. Fact is, vituperative verbal smackdowns are nothing new. Civil discourse has waxed and waned since Socrates took the hemlock, and you know you could always find some grump down at the end of the Athenian coffee bar who could snort into his macchiato and tell you that chowderhead Socrates was no Anaxagoras.
    When I was a much younger man, my politics were firmly settled. My friend Gene’s were settled exactly the opposite. We pelted each other with ideologic regurgitations, and when Gene moved away we continued to skirmish via photocopied newsletters, articles, and statistics highlighted and triple-underlined and (this being the pre-internet age) fired to-and-fro via the US Postal Service. It was a sweet coincidence then, when—each having composed a letter unbeknownst to the other—our terms of ceasefire crossed in the mail. Realizing we were at risk of killingour friendship with someone else’s ammunition, we decided to put an end to the broadsides.
    So often we find ourselves longing for nuance. For thoughtful exchange. For the chance to think out loud, take it back, and try again. I once received a very angry note from a man who said he was so torqued off by something I had written in a book that he threw it down immediately and would never read another word I wrote, which I take to mean he never got around to the part seven pages later where I retracted the passage that scorched his shorts in the first place.
    I love my wife because on a regular basis she allows me to say the wrong thing, back up, reboot, and retry. She has this reasonableness about her. Proven in part by the fact that I once told her I loved her because of her reasonableness, and yet—having just received the complimentary equivalent of a vacuum cleaner for Christmas—she stayed with me.
    At some point you have to make the call. Agreeing to disagree is by and large a theoretical privilege. And somebody has to lead the charge, speaking—or even braying—in the argot of attack and counterattack. To stir it up and take the flak. Was everyone a waffling muddler like me, no issue would be raised, no dragons slain. But we wafflers have a role too: to listen, absorb, chew things over, just stand there boots on the ground and hands in pockets, shooting the breeze and not each other.
    Four hundred–plus years ago my favorite dead Frenchman, Montaigne, wrote that “harmony is a wholly tedious quality in conversation.” In other words, there is more to be learned by knocking heads than nodding them in unison. But he didn’t stick the word conversation in there by accident. He assumed we would convene in disagreement, but that we would indeed convene, and once convened would converse.
    Eventually, back there on my farm, the man got in his pickup truck and drove