Although he dubbed it a “sign of weakness” best ignored, gossip was encouraged at Kant’s dinner parties under “the duty of secrecy”: what was said at the table, stayed at the table. Kierkegaard also repudiated the practice. The Danish philosopher considered it ephemeral and applied a classist lens to its analysis: “Idle talk is something that anyone can rake up,” he wrote, detracting from gossip’s exclusivity and in so doing, any interest it might hold. Hannah Arendt believed that, when it came to being seen and heard, only that which lay in the public sphere was of any importance. Gossip? An act unworthy of organized memory. Even Phoebe Ephron, the mother of Nora Ephron who was a screenwriter given to telling her writer-director daughter about the importance of listening carefully because everything can serve as fodder for art — “everything is copy,” she’d repeat — feared the consequences loose lips could have on her own persona. When a friend who she had invited to her home asked if she could bring Lillian Ross, The New Yorker’s observative social chronicler who had a unique ability to express the character of her subjects, Ephron placed a condition upon Ross’s attendance: that she could come, but she wasn’t allowed to write of anything she witnessed.
Immanuel Kant, Nora Ephron, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard, Hannah Arendt, Marguerite Duras, Rachel Cusk, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Montserrat Roig Leer más