Thursday, October 8, 2015

The Art of Listening

Thursday, October 8, 2015
1835 French Fashions
Loretta reports:

It had seemed to me that listening had become a lost art, which I blamed, as one does so much else, on technology.

Then I came upon these pages in The Gentleman and Lady's Book of Politeness of 1833 (the English translation is the U.S. edition of a French etiquette manual).

Apparently, every generation needs to be reminded, and not everybody learns or cares to learn. While some of the rules in the book will seem to us very dated and even backward, this part at least strikes me as reasonable and kind, in the way etiquette is supposed to work.

Listening

 Fashion illustration for April 1835 courtesy Los Angeles Public Library, Casey Fashion Plates.
Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will take you to the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

1 comments:

LynS said...

This links with an recent article on how memorization is changing due to technology. People had better memories when they had to memorize and recite, but with technology there is no need to remember things. However, there is so much more information than before, this may be an essential adaption.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/health/15memory.html

 
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