On Talking

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 of 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 percent 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 wax-work 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 even a 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 even to the mind. He would be a foolish man, however, who waited until he had a wise thought to take part in the buzzing with his neighbors. 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. At the end of an evening during which they have said nothing at immense length, they justly plume themselves on their success as conversationalists.