Latest news with #Callard
Sky News AU
12 hours ago
- Business
- Sky News AU
Amart reveals plan to purchase Freedom Furniture in $1b merger to shake up local retail market
Aussie furniture retailer Amart has announced plans to purchase Freedom Furniture and create a powerhouse which will turn over about $1 billion annually. The takeover of Greenlit Brands' Freedom Furniture by Amart, which is backed by Quadrant Private Equity, will establish a group with 120 stores across Australia and New Zealand. The two businesses will remain separate and facilitate one another as they both look to expand their store numbers. Both companies are in competition against Harvey Norman, which turns over about $6b annually, while Freedom Furniture rivals ASX-listed designer furniture retailer Nick Scali. There are currently 196 Harvey Norman, Domayne and Joyce Mayne stores in Australia alongside 45 in New Zealand. Freedom Furniture has 47 stores across Australia, 13 in New Zealand and six distribution centres alongside offices in Sydney and Auckland. Amart currently has 66 stores and could target about 100 stores, while Freedom Furniture could expand to an 80-100 store network, according to the Australian Financial Review. Freedom Furniture's CEO Blaine Callard said joining forces with Amart was key for the company's growth. 'Freedom has achieved significant momentum thanks to our team and loyal customers,' Mr Callard said. 'We're excited about the opportunity to continue our growth journey alongside Amart, while staying true to our mission of offering inspirational, design-led products for the home.' Amart chairman Chris Hadley said the acquisition will ultimately be a boon for customers. 'Freedom is an iconic furniture brand across Australia and New Zealand, which is highly complementary to Amart,' Mr Hadley said. 'This acquisition will result in greater choice and value for customers. We look forward to welcoming the Freedom team to Amart and supporting their next phase of growth.' Amart's CEO Lee Chadwick added to this sentiment, arguing the deal creates a better platform for Freedom Furniture as it looks to bolster growth and further its customer reach. 'We are excited to support Freedom on the next wave of its growth journey from expanding the store network and growing online sales, to strengthening product range and category depth,' Mr Chadwick said. 'The combined business is well placed to deliver quality, stylish products to more customers, more often.' Amart said the merger will allow the combined business to increase scale, boost supply chain efficiency and investment capability while each outlet maintains their own identities. Following the deal, Greenlit now only holds Fantastic Furniture in its Australian furniture stable. Greenlit came from its parent group Steinhoff International Holdings after it became engulfed in controversy for overstating its profits. The Amart-Freedom Furniture merger is yet to be approved and is subject to customary conditions.
South Wales Argus
3 days ago
- Politics
- South Wales Argus
Vandalised ex library in Abergavenny won't yet become mosque
The disused grade II listed Carnegie Library, in Abergavenny, was set to be brought back into use by the Monmouthshire Muslim Community Association as a community centre and the county's first mosque. Though Monmouthshire County Council's cabinet had agreed it would offer the association a 30-year lease on the building that was last used as a pupil referral unit that decision will now have to go back to the cabinet which has 10 working days to meet and reconsider. A council committee meeting, called after three opposition councillors objected, could have accepted the decision but in a tied vote agreed to refer it back to the cabinet on the casting vote of scrutiny chair Jane Lucas. Some 48 hours before Wednesday's pre-arranged meeting the building, on the edge of the town centre, was vandalised with the words 'No Masjid' sprayed on one of its walls and crosses beside the doors along with the word 'no'. Masjid is Arabic for place of worship or mosque. The committee cited nine reasons, following its three hour meeting which included more than 30 minutes in a confidential session due to discussion around finances, why the cabinet should reconsider the decision. A photograph showing the anti-Muslim vandalism of the former Abergavenny Library. During the meeting the Labour cabinet member for finance, Cllr Ben Callard, who lives near the proposed mosque, defended how the former library had been declared as surplus to the council's requirements, last November, at a cabinet meeting and then the decision to grant the lease was also taken to the cabinet. If councillors disagreed with disposal of the building the November decision should have been called in, said Cllr Callard. He said taking the decisions in public had given them 'oxygen' but disputed all leases could be subject to full public consultation. The Llanfoist and Govilon councillor said: 'I don't see how we can as a landlord enter leases if we have to bring them to a scrutiny committee.' Cllr Callard since 2022 the council has entered 37 leases, with the figure rising to 63 when also considering short term arrangements and licences, and said: 'For no others was there a demand to review them or for prior scrutiny or to use the call in process.' Abergavenny Town of Sanctuary organised a show of support for the proposed mosque outside the Monmouthshire council chamber with some town councillors including Mayor Philip Bowyer and some members of the Monmouthshire Muslim Community Association. He also defended the terms of the lease, agreed in principle at a £6,000 a year rent, and said it was on a 'full repair basis' and said: 'That doesn't make it very attractive to businesses. It's a huge commitment to take on a building of that age.' Councillors had questioned the value of the lease as an earlier council document stated an ambition of raising a rental income of £25,000 to £30,000 a year from the former library. The council's landlord services manager, Nick Keys, said leases of 25, 30 and 99 years are common for the council to grant, with long term security often required by grant funding bodies such as the National Lottery, and the 30 year lease was requested. Mr Keys added the council also has clauses such as rent reviews. Final terms of the lease were still to be agreed. Conservative member for Shirenewton Louise Brown, one of the three councillors who called the decision in, questioned why the invitation to tender hadn't specified the building could be used for commercial purposes under its restrictive covenant. The former Abergavenny Library. Llanelly Hill independent Simon Howarth said members weren't aware of decisions related to the library as they hadn't been added to the council's forward work planner. Devauden Conservative Rachel Buckler described the library building as one of Abergavenny's 'most important civic buildings.' The committee said the cabinet should consider a re-tender with specifications including an independent valuation, a survey of the building, consideration of the building's history and importance, a public consultation and the possibility of selling the building. The library service was relocated to the Town Hall in 2015.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- General
- The Guardian
‘We're not doing the thing we're built to do': Agnes Callard, the philosopher living life according to Socrates
What happens when a dedicated life of the mind confronts the messiness of earthly desires? The Chicago University philosophy professor Agnes Callard, who in some moods believes herself to be channelling Socrates, was forced to ask herself that question one afternoon in 2011 when she was discussing with a graduate student a particular thorny problem in Greek thought, the abstract question of why one means something singularly different from two. In the course of unpacking this problem, another related dilemma arose, however: this was the insistent fact that the pair of them – student and teacher – had, in the course of their discussions over that term, fallen suddenly and hopelessly in love, a less abstract kind of coupling. They agreed nothing could happen, but the next day, on a plane journey to visit her parents in New York, Callard, then 35, decided she could be no kind of Socratic disciple, if she could not, in this charged instant, be entirely true to her ideals. The 'inner experience of love' she felt for her student, Arnold, 27, she thought, was of a different, higher quality to that she felt for her husband, Ben, though their marriage to that point had been contented and fulfilling, and they had two young sons. She resolved on that flight that the honest thing to do must be to end her marriage, and when she returned to Ben she did what her philosophical hero would have done – she engaged in deep dialogue with him about this problem. Husband and wife talked for a whole day about the different kinds of love (Ben was also a philosopher). 'I had never felt so close to him,' Callard recalled. And the following day they decided they must get divorced. That confrontation and its fallout for Callard and the two men in her life was set out in a profile of the philosopher by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker magazine in 2023, one of the most widely read and shared articles of that year – and almost the perfect New Yorker story with its mix of high seriousness and relationship carnage. At the time that story was published, Callard was working to complete a book about the third man in her life, Socrates. The revelations in the New Yorker article, when set out in print, prompted her to add a chapter about 'Socratising' our ideas about love – that is to say, being constantly alive to their complications, always prepared to examine and discuss them, and to be resolute about the consequences of that quest for honesty. Callard's – brilliant, compulsive – book Open Socrates and what it might mean to live according to his ideals of 'hard-line intellectualism' is now published. A week or two ago, Callard was sitting opposite me in a basement dining room of a London hotel trying to explain not only the nuances of that philosophy – but also its effect on her life. One in which she is now married to her graduate student, Arnold, but also living platonically with her ex-husband, Ben, a kind of ideal philosophical throuple. My own grasp of Greek philosophy doesn't extend much beyond the first verse of the Monty Python drinking song, but one idea I like to think I've half-gleaned from Aristotle is that though you cannot choose the life fate gives you, you can, crucially, decide whether to interpret it as a tragedy or as a (sometimes bleak) comedy. Doesn't Socrates tend to fall, I offer (betraying my millennia of ignorance) into the first – philosopher's – trap, of always looking for truth and reason where none may exist? Ah, Callard suggests, shaking her head. And she uses that misunderstanding as a starting point for a somewhat one-sided hour-long dialogue of our own. 'It is true,' she says, 'that you can view life as a comedy or a tragedy, but I really think that Socrates thought there's a third possibility. That is, you can refute things. You can investigate them, never settle on an answer. There's an inquisitive mode of living, in which you're living your life at the same time as not assuming you know how to live it.' That sounds familiar, I say. Socrates, of course, was convicted and elected to die for his indefatigable 'gadfly' questioning – for his 'corruption of the youth' of Athens by introducing them to critical thinking, specifically, 'failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges' and 'introducing new deities' – those of doubt and reason. Callard is good in her book on the difficulties of this heroic refusal to accept received wisdom. 'People will announce, 'Question everything!',' she writes, 'without noticing they have just uttered not a question, but a command.' Although doubt, I suggest, might be a good deal more prevalent these days than in ancient Athens (not least among Observer interviewers), does she think that we are generally built to live in constant conversational uncertainty – isn't it a bit exhausting? 'In the last part of the book,' she says, 'what I basically argue, is yes, we are absolutely built to do that. And my evidence for it is to look at the parts of life where we have the most problems: romance, death, politics.' What exactly is her evidence? 'What I try to do is show that our problems come from trying to manage what must be an essentially inquisitive activity, uninquisitively.' Because we try to seize on half-baked certainties rather than proper questions? 'Yes. We're screwing up because we're not doing the thing we're built to do.' In response to my somewhat confused expression, she reaches for an example. 'Look at the kind of behaviour we accept as routine in the context of love and romance, and put it in the context of, say, food,' she says. One common idea of love 'would be like seeing somebody standing outside a restaurant, and banging on the door, and you'd be like, 'Oh, that restaurant's closed.' And you'd point out that there are these other restaurants that are open. And he's like, 'No, I have to go to this one.' You'd say, 'Why? Is the food really good?' And he's like, 'No, I hate the food here.' That's just what we do when we're texting the person who broke up with us. 'He's a jerk, but I need to have him.' We don't hear how insane that sounds because we've gotten used to it. Socrates would say there's a better way. You're built to do something else.' In Callard's book, if I'm reading it right, the trigger for that better way lies in the presence of insistent 'untimely thoughts', intimations of death or meaninglessness, that should force us into that Socratic life of restless and playful dialogue with others. The example she gives as a failure in this regard – she is nothing if not intellectually ambitious – is Leo Tolstoy, specifically after he had just written Anna Karenina, was 50 years old, living on his vast estate, lauded by all society, but had fallen into grave despair. His undoing was a simple question, an untimely thought, that bounced around his head and would not go away: 'What will come from my whole life?' That even the great novelist was almost destroyed by that thought, offers what Callard calls the 'Tolstoy problem': that rather than living lives of denial, we must instead not flinch from looking into the abyss of uncertainty. Socrates, she argues, shows that liberty lies in commitments to the questions themselves, to following them where they lead, without the hope of what Jeremy Clarkson might call final answers. In an earlier life when she was a student, I'm reminded, Callard went through a phase of going up to strangers in the public square, as Socrates would do, and trying to engage with them on the tough questions in their lives. It was not an unqualified success. She came to the US aged five, after her Jewish parents, a doctor and a lawyer, had found a way to escape Soviet Hungary. Her parents were committed atheists but she was sent to Orthodox schools because she could get scholarships 'on account of my grandparents being Holocaust survivors'. She would argue constantly with the rabbis about the existence of God ('they were extremely patient' she says). When did she first come across Socrates, I wonder. 'I was in high school, on the debate team,' she says. 'On a summer course they mentioned there's this thing called philosophy that you can put into your debate speeches, and you'll win more.' At 13, she went to Barnes & Noble and bought one book from every major philosopher. Immanuel Kant was her first crush, but Socrates 'famously ugly – bug-eyed, snub-nosed, and goatish' – took over. 'I was into math and physics at school, because there were clear right answers,' she says. 'With other subjects, I felt like the teacher was just making up the rules. But with this world of philosophy it seemed like you could have that same attitude as the math, physics attitude, but it could be about the difficult stuff that shows up in your life.' Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion Callard had an autism diagnosis in her late 30s, which she welcomed because it explained some of her past experience, though she is still examining the value of it. 'It seemed to organise a whole bunch of ways in which I've just been weird,' she says, with a smile. 'You know, like: you're very literal; you read really fast; you alienate the parents of all the kids you've ever been friends with, because you seem like a freak; you get obsessions with patterns etc. For a moment [the diagnosis] feels like understanding, and then it also just kind of feels like, well, it's just a bunch of stuff clumped together.' Her ex-husband, Ben, who has become something of a reluctant sympathy figure in rarefied corners of social media since the New Yorker profile came out, describes Callard as 'the least complacent person he has ever met'. I take our conversation back to love, that original 'untimely thought', and wonder if she thinks of that earlier dramatic turning point in her life differently in retrospect. 'There are moments that pop up in life where I am reminded that the Socratic path is the only way forward,' she says. 'And I definitely think falling in love was one such moment. Maybe less directly in relation to the person I fell in love with than in relation to my ex-husband. I felt we were suddenly in a position where there was nothing to guide us. There was no way for us to move forward except to have a conversation in which we each just tried to say what's true.' If there is one lesson from her book, it is the faith that truths emerge socially, from hard conversations like that, not from internal thought? 'Yes. There was no mould for how to manage that situation. But it was like magic. A lot of people, when they hear that story, that's the part they find the most incredible, the fact that my not yet ex-husband and I were just able to have a conversation about this, where we were like, what's the best for us? When we got divorced, you know, it didn't even occur to me that it would ever be possible for us to live in the same house, for instance, but that happened.' Her ex-husband, she says, is probably the person she speaks to the most, usually about philosophy, and often on the phone from separate rooms. And what about Arnold, her current husband, should she have trusted that first flood of emotion? 'Did I somehow feel sure that things would work out with Arnold? I think I did, but I think that was a bit of an illusory feeling. But I feel confident that whatever happens with Arnold at any point, we're going to be able to work it through.' If the tables had been turned, I wonder, and if Ben had fallen philosophically head over heels, would she have reacted in the same way? 'I don't know. I feel like a lot of what I now know about the situation, I learned from going through it.' Callard is 49 now. I wonder if she is still aspirational for the same kind of things as she was at 35? 'My experience of my life is a lot like when my son, my oldest, was three or four,' she says. 'I remember asking his nursery school teacher about his development. This was at UC Berkeley, I was a grad student, and they did all kinds of research on the kids. The teacher showed me a picture of movements of the child in the classroom over the course of a day. And his movement was like crazy zigzags all over the place. 'That is what his day looked like in the fall,' she said. And then she showed me a picture from the spring. And it was all calm and organised. And that's a bit what my life feels like to me.' I mention something to her I'd read the other day, that the opposite of success isn't failure, it's boredom and loneliness. It sounds like, I say, if she's learned one thing from these experiences it is that we are at our best as social animals… 'That's interesting,' she says. 'Philosophy, I think, is a leisure activity. Indeed, it's the leisure activity, but it's not a relaxing one, or one that you can do on your own. It's like sometimes we might watch Netflix or whatever, but we also sometimes need to read a classic novel. In a way, a minimal claim of my book is that you should extend that same generosity to your conversational life. You want to have these hard conversations, because they are some of the best things in life.' At this point in our dialogue, Pen, from Callard's publisher, pops her head around the door to say I have time for one more question before Agnes has to leave. Socrates, I'm thinking, wouldn't have liked the sound of that at all. Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Chicago Tribune
06-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Philosophy professor Agnes Callard believes in the power of a full-blown argument
Socrates, of all the philosophers in the history of mankind, was probably the biggest pain in the ass. He believed argument itself was the core to understanding anyone, including himself. He didn't want to convince you. He didn't want you to agree to disagree with him. He didn't want you to agree at all — for therein held one's freedom. On his deathbed, with a solid conviction about what to expect from the afterlife, he urged friends to argue against the existence of an afterlife. He lived, and died, to argue. The man had become so annoying that an Athenian court, having decided he was damaging the morality of Grecian youth, sentenced Socrates to death by self-poisoning. The man was exasperating. For a brief time, though, Agnes Callard gave him a run for his money. Somewhat intentionally. She had spent most of her childhood not being understood and had found Socrates the key to explaining herself and the way she thought about life. So, long before becoming an associate philosophy professor at University of Chicago, before becoming among the most popular teachers on campus, as well as the subject of a 2023 New Yorker profile (partly centered around how she lived in the same home with both her second husband and her first husband), many years ago, fresh out of high school, Callard gently accosted strangers in line outside the Art Institute of Chicago. She asked them the unanswerable. She sidled up and asked if they were interested in having a philosophical conversation, and when they replied, Uh… yeah, sure, she peppered them with questions, things that no one could reasonably answer, like What is the meaning of life? And What is art? It didn't go well. For one thing, she wasn't a philosophy major, she just wanted to understand Socrates better. She had studied ancient Greek, she took Greek history classes. 'But there was something more I wanted,' she says now, at 49. 'And that was to be Socrates. Not to figure him out. To inhabit him, fill his shoes.' To be possessed by the spirit of the Greek philosopher. She was taken by the way Socrates lived 'on the edge of himself,' always eager to turn his beliefs and approach to life upside down after a convincing argument. She went to the stone steps of the Art Institute, the most classically ancient-seeming space she could think of. She felt good about it. When she asked strangers to have a philosophical argument, no one turned her down. The problem was the arguing part: 'I would ask, oh, 'What is art?' And they would say you can't define art. I would say 'But you defined it well enough to want to see it here today.' I was trying to challenge them.' They weren't ready to be challenged, I said. 'Yes but is anyone ever ready!' Callard said with a fervor that gives you a hint of her younger self. 'The people I accosted had at least heard of philosophy and Socrates — more people have heard of Socrates and philosophy now than they did (when he was alive). It should be easy for me to do this! But no, people found me inscrutable. Was I pushing a religion on them? Was I trying to sell them something? I have a very literal-minded personality and I didn't understand why this wasn't working, and the more I tried to challenge them, the more they seemed almost uncomfortable and afraid of me.' If there's an origin story to Agnes Callard, that's as good a place as any to start. Her superpowers as a philosopher sprung out of the frustration at getting her thoughts and herself across to people who would care less about philosophy. She began university life as an academic philosopher, writing for academics, but after she was named the philosophy department's director of undergraduate studies, she became a public philosopher. She began thinking harder about ways that philosophy should be inserted into everyday life. She decided philosophy had to matter to students in Hyde Park who didn't take philosophy. She started the ongoing 'Night Hawks' series of late-night philosophical debates, among the most popular regular activities on campus. She wrote for publications such as the New Yorker, New York Times and Atlantic about morals and philosophy, as well as anger and ambition and marriage. Her new book, 'Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life,' is her most direct act of public philosophy yet — a self-improvement narrative centered on Socrates' insistence that we live a more interesting life through the hard work of facing ideas we're not comfortable with. It presents, in a way, an intellectual roadmap for four more years of a Trump presidency. For most of us, she argues, Socrates is a watered-down 'sauce' poured over simplistic affirmations about staying open-minded and fearing the unexamined life (not worth living, Socrates said). His true relevance to 2025 would be that the only thing he knows is the fact of his own ignorance. He was never big into zero-sum arguments. His famed Socratic Method, Callard writes, only works when you argue with someone 'who has taken on a role distinct from yours.' Anything else tends to be performative. Then, because Callard is nothing if not provocative, she used her employer, University of Chicago, as an example of performative commitment to freedom. She brings up the school's much-discussed statement that free speech extends to all subjects, insisting this 'principle can neither now nor at any future time be called into question.' Freedom to question, Callard replied with a smirk, apparently 'extends to all subjects but one. ' None of this, of course, is easy or quickly understood. Callard gets that. She seems to regard her everyday life as an extension of the struggle to get across big ideas in an approachable way. In graduate school at the University of Chicago, a fellow student once took her aside to say the class thought of her as a kind of crazy lady that nobody understood. 'So I feel like since then I have gradually pulled myself up by the bootstraps of intelligibility to make myself more coherent to people.' The second you step into her office you wonder if she's overcompensating. The room resembles the set of an aggressively cheerful children's TV show. Colors and patterns explode in every corner. The door is covered in a Warhol-like repetition of Socrates faces; the blackboard is framed with more busts of Socrates. 'Refute and Be Refuted' is scrawled in large block letters on the ceiling above an alcove. There's a tree made of yarn. Lego castles climb walls. Keith Haring's cartoon person dances along a wall. Callard enters wearing bright pink tights and a black dress covered in unicorns that, in a different decade, might have done double duty as a black-light poster. When I attended one of her classes, she wore a striped dress and striped leggings that looked like a lesson in friendly clashing. She was teaching Descartes. It was the second class of the semester and she wrote in a corner of the blackboard: 'Nothing is certain.' A moment later, she scribbled: 'Except this claim.' She told her students, all freshmen, she was so excited to introduce them to Descartes. She bounced on the balls of her feet as she spoke, and when she spoke, she had a slightly vowely drawl suggesting she grew up on a surfboard in Southern California; when she talks on podcasts, listeners leave comments that she doesn't sound like a professor or philosopher. The truth is she grew up in Hungary and then Lower Manhattan. She notes that she sounds the same to everyone, regardless of who she is talking to. She doesn't speak in different registers. She speaks to her kids the way she speaks to her students and her coworkers. Words tumble out and stack up and need a second to be spliced apart before they get replaced with a new pile of words. Her problem, she smiles, is 'reconstituting the demand to be intelligible with the desire to be enthusiastic.' More than a decade ago, she was diagnosed with autism. However, she said she is still so much 'in the early stages of trying to understand it myself, it's hard for me to say anything (about it) that isn't me being pulled in by the gravitational force of some cliche.' Callard thinks she probably became a good teacher because 'when you are teaching you tend to be very self-conscious about the question of how you are coming across.' She's spent a lifetime doing that. She didn't have many friends as a child. She read a lot of novels, 'Because, what do humans do?' It was hard to feel like she was on the same page with anyone, she said. Her mother was an oncologist and her father was a lawyer, 'and we left Hungary because of a lot of antisemitism and so much corruption.' They struggled in New York. She attended Orthodox Jewish schools, 'which treated me and my sister as charity cases because we were the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. But we were not religious. Kids couldn't come over since we didn't keep kosher. My mom worried about me being indoctrinated: 'Don't worry how you do in religion classes — there is no God.' The rabbi would say, 'You are a smart girl, you need to study.' I'd say it's all fake, why bother?' She memorized Shel Silverstein poems because 'children memorized poems in Hungary,' and when her teacher in New York asked her to write a poem, she wrote a Shel Silverstein poem. The teacher spoke to the class about plagiarism and called Callard's mother. Her mother said they were jealous because American children are stupid. 'Childhood was like that. I do the wrong thing then insist my way was just fine.' One day in fifth grade, a popular girl sat with her at lunch and they became best friends. A year later, she asked her friend why she sat with her that day. 'She told me she heard a rumor that after fifth grade, everything is reversed and the least popular kids suddenly become the most popular kids and she wanted to get in on the ground floor with me.' Philosophy — which Callard said she initially studied via the philosophy shelf of a Barnes & Noble — presented her with a way of living, an ongoing conversation in which the challenge is being understood, maybe profoundly. To this day, with her own kids, dinner comes with a question: Should you ever lie? Would you rather fly or be invisible? Christmas dinner was served with a side of: Should you ever take revenge? Understanding, real thought, Callard said, happens best in person, socially, among people who disagree but are open to arriving at some kind of an answer. What Socrates teaches us, she writes in 'Open Socrates,' is that we only avoid ignorance by having the right kind of arguments with people who disagree — conversations in which those who are talking regard one another as equals, always pushing toward some truth. Good luck with 2025, Socrates. Callard has been studying how conversation works, how pauses happen, how people take turns. 'Communicating without that structure is close to impossible for humans,' she said. 'Yet it appears possible. Writing, for instance, is hard, it takes a long time to get good, realize what an audience might expect and so on. On social media, a bunch of people who can't write try to communicate through writing. It's a bunch of people walking around with eyes closed assuming when someone bumps into you, they're evil.' Socrates, Callard explains, believed that being understood happens when both sides of a conversation talk in good faith. 'One of the things Socrates convinced me of was I don't have opinions — I have words. I have an illusion of opinions and not until I get into conversation do I get to think about the questions.' You should not, for instance, move to Portugal, or Vermont, assuming everyone there would agree with you. Where people tend to agree is where you hear more honest conversations, revealing shades of agreement and disagreement. It's probably true within your family. 'In a place where everyone seems to agree,' Callard said, 'that's where the real conversations might happen.' And yet Socrates, she said, thought that every argument is resolved. It just takes more than five minutes in front of the Art Institute. 'Even among people who never agree, there can be hope,' Callard said. 'When in life are you most often surprised? Conversations are when surprises most often happen. And because we can never eliminate the possibility of surprise, that means hope.' Or as Socrates would put it, the only thing we shouldn't do is remain as we are.
