With a well-intended but somewhat unorthodox show of manners, I once picked up a roadkilled pheasant to bring to a friend who invited me to dinner. The bird was still warm. It had a broken wing but no visible trauma to the meaty body. It had clearly been hit by a passing vehicle only moments before. I was headed for the hills, the Knobs of Kentucky, on a narrow midwestern road that carried farm vehicles and fast-moving pickups. I knew from childhood that a guest arrives with a gift for the host and preferably something to add to the meal. I was empty-handed until I spied that lump on the road.
In the end, the manners were all my friend’s. He answered my good intentions with his own, and we plucked, cooked and enjoyed the pheasant. We continue to enjoy it 35 years later, not just because it has become a prominent story in our relational lexicon, but because it is a lesson in manners, and manners, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, are disappearing as fast as true wilderness.
I was introduced to manners by my older sister who, in 1959, at the age of almost 10, defiantly told our mother, “Go blow your nose.” Those four incendiary words taught me everything I needed to know about the power of language and the critical nature of context. But more than that I understood a boundary had been violated, some invisible order had been intentionally disrupted. My sister’s challenge was personal and necessary to her—our mother was meddling in her business, apparently—but it went well beyond the personal. The room tipped an inch—the whole city tipped and slid. This breach of manners stopped communication in its tracks. A chasm opened up between my mother and sister. I could see it happen. The parquet floor cracked and opened, my mother on one side, nodding and tightening her jaw, and my sister on the other, finally looking afraid. Manners was the scaffold, I understood in that moment, and on it we hung the tools by which the peace was kept.
Manners, a friend tells me, are old-fashioned. She stops short of saying out of date, but the truth is manners have an infinite shelf-life. They are an intention expressed in ever-changing ways. The difference between “you’re welcome” and “no problem” is a matter of language rather than intent, just as “go blow your nose” is a 1959 version of something that can’t be printed in this publication.
Spoken language is only one expression of manners. Letters, gestures, facial expressions all communicate manners or a breach of them. Exasperated sighs, a slight turning away of the head, a faraway look to avoid eye contact. Human beings pay close attention to each other. We read each other long before we open our mouths to speak. We test a room to decide whether we can be vulnerable in front of those present, whether we can say what we think and show what we feel, and this is the point of manners. Manners allow our human depth to emerge. They are codified actions, designed to promote safety and freedom. Truce, they say. You may meet disagreement here, but you will not be harmed or insulted. Think of all the different cultural forms of greeting. Hugs, handshakes, high-fives, the European double-sided kiss. For most of us, the body’s habit is to contact, to connect, to sense the security or danger in a situation, and manners are the accepted form of discernment.
People who cling to manners may seem chilly. There’s a formality that can interfere with closeness and maybe it’s meant to; maybe those people are afraid. Instead of brandishing a sword and running us through, they’re letting us know we’ve crossed into their discomfort zone and it would be advisable to take two steps back. Their intention is made clear by manners.
Years ago I met a man wheeling his bicycle along a road in Burma. He was white-haired and wearing loose khaki shorts and a white T-shirt. A bundle of wood was stacked on the seat of his bicycle and in one hand he carried a small saw. I was wheeling a bicycle, too, because it had a flat tire. The man smiled and bowed to me, and I bowed back. I was used to this. Everyone in Burma bowed. But then he did a curious thing. He started unloading his bicycle, placing the wood on the ground. When that was done he tilted the bike toward me, indicating I should take it and leave him mine, flat tire and all. I shook my head, astonished, but he laughed and nodded, and without a word between us I knew if I continued to refuse I would risk a breach of international etiquette. I accepted his offer, and we bowed again and went our separate ways.
The other day, sitting out under the pear tree in my yard, waiting for spring, I started thinking about mice. Why don’t mice need manners? What is the difference between humans and mice? We need peanuts and popcorn just as they do, and water and nests to raise our babies. But humans seek freedom and mice do not. Is it our drive for freedom—personal and species-wide—that asks for manners? And if so, if freedom cannot be negotiated without manners, why do we increasingly eschew them?
Guns are meant to protect our freedom too, our freedom to do and speak as we please. But this is immature freedom, self-serving freedom. The freedom I’m speaking of doesn’t sacrifice you for the sake of me. It’s not dependent on a weapon, a fist or an enraged tweet. It’s not something that can be taken away, even by a misused gun. It can be taught, and it can be communicated. When a candidate for public office addresses a high school student with whom he disagrees as a “skinhead lesbian,” it is time to teach manners, to teach respect. Without respect—a capacity which also distinguishes us from rodents—communication comes to a halt. Right now, this country of mine and yours—of ours—brings to mind that childhood scene, that parquet floor that gaped between my mother and sister. It was my first and most memorable encounter with a peace disturbed and dissolved by language, by words intent on a kind of freedom, but an immature, self-serving freedom. It was, for a long time in our house, a broken place that could not be mended.
