ACME
30-11-2010, 06:50 PM
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Silence is unnatural to man. He begins life with a cry and ends it in stillness. In the interval he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and there are few things of which he stands in more fear than the absence of noise. Even his conversation is in great measure a desperate attempt to prevent a dreadful silence. If he is introduced to a fellow mortal, and a number of pauses occur in the conversation, he regards himself as a failure, a worthless person, and is full of envy of the emptiest-headed chatterbox. He knows that ninety-nine per cent of human conversation means no more than the buzzing of a fly, but he longs to join in the buzz, and to prove that he is a man and not a waxwork figure. The object of conversation is not, for the most part, to communicate ideas: it is to keep up the buzzing sound. There are, it must be admitted, different qualities of buzz: there is the even buzz that is as exasperating as the continuous ping of a mosquito. But at a dinner party one would rather be a mosquito than a mute. Most buzzing, fortunately, is agreeable to the ear, and some of it is agreeable to the mind. He would be a foolish man, however, who waited till he had a wise thought before taking part in the buzzing with his neighbours. Those who despise the weather as a conversational opening seem to me to be ignorant of the reason why human beings wish to talk. Very few human beings join in a conversation in the hope of learning anything new. Some of them are content if they are merely allowed to go on making a noise into other people's ears, though they have nothing to tell them except thet they have seen two or three new plays or that they have had bad food in a Swiss hotel. At the end of an evening during which they have said nothing at immense length they congratulate themselves on their success as conversationists.
Robert Lynd
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Silence is unnatural to man. He begins life with a cry and ends it in stillness. In the interval he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and there are few things of which he stands in more fear than the absence of noise. Even his conversation is in great measure a desperate attempt to prevent a dreadful silence. If he is introduced to a fellow mortal, and a number of pauses occur in the conversation, he regards himself as a failure, a worthless person, and is full of envy of the emptiest-headed chatterbox. He knows that ninety-nine per cent of human conversation means no more than the buzzing of a fly, but he longs to join in the buzz, and to prove that he is a man and not a waxwork figure. The object of conversation is not, for the most part, to communicate ideas: it is to keep up the buzzing sound. There are, it must be admitted, different qualities of buzz: there is the even buzz that is as exasperating as the continuous ping of a mosquito. But at a dinner party one would rather be a mosquito than a mute. Most buzzing, fortunately, is agreeable to the ear, and some of it is agreeable to the mind. He would be a foolish man, however, who waited till he had a wise thought before taking part in the buzzing with his neighbours. Those who despise the weather as a conversational opening seem to me to be ignorant of the reason why human beings wish to talk. Very few human beings join in a conversation in the hope of learning anything new. Some of them are content if they are merely allowed to go on making a noise into other people's ears, though they have nothing to tell them except thet they have seen two or three new plays or that they have had bad food in a Swiss hotel. At the end of an evening during which they have said nothing at immense length they congratulate themselves on their success as conversationists.
Robert Lynd
.