To Bore or Not to Bore

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB

‘TAKE me away,’ said Thomas Carlyle, when silence settled for a moment over a dinner-table where one diner had been monologuing to the limit of boredom, ‘for God’s sake take me away, and put me in a room by myself and give me a pipe of tobacco!’

Little as we may otherwise resemble Carlyle, many of us have felt this emotion; and some realize (although the painful suspicion comes from a mind too analytical for its own comfort) that we may have occasioned it. Carlyle defined the feeling when he said, ‘To sit still and be pumped into is never an exhilarating process.’ But pumping is different. How often have I myself, my adieus seemingly done, my hat in my hand and my feet on the threshold, taken a fresh grip, hat or no hat, on the pump-handle, and set good-natured, Christian folk distressedly wondering if I would never stop! And how often have I afterward recalled something strained and morbidly intent in their expressions, a glassiness of the staring eye and a starchiness in the smiling lip, that has made me suffer under my bedcover and swear that next time I would depart like a sky-rocket!

Truly it seems surprising, in a fortunate century when the correspondence school offers so many inexpensive educational advantages for deficient adults, that one never sees an advertisement —