The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [47]
The antisocial sense of the verb “to bore” sauntered into the language around 1750, on the arm of the expression “French bore,” “boredom” making its belated literary debut the following century, with languid Lady Dedlock in Dickens’s Bleak House. Lexicographers can’t decide how it came to mean what it does, or displaced its ancestors—apathetic “accidie” (affliction of famished monks, tormented by pre-lunch sugar lows in the form of “noonday devils”); peevish “spleen” or mundane “dullness” (as defined by Samuel Johnson: “to make dictionaries is dull work”). My theory is bores got their name because they bore a hole in conversation out of which enthusiasm rapidly drains.
If the notion was born of the age of industrialization, on a practical level tedium today is mass-produced by leisure, be there nothing to do or so much choice none seems worthwhile. The latter is commonly diagnosed as an illness, “options paralysis,” and privileged Westerners seem to be suffering an ennui epidemic (in 2007, 36 percent of Britons, beneficiaries of the world’s fourth largest economy, rated themselves “very happy,” compared to 52 percent in poor, gray 1957). Feel-good businesses are booming and we have a brand-new science, “positive psychology.”
The idea of a Well-being Institute at Cambridge University (est. 2006) may strike you as certifiable, but boredom is no laughing matter. It drives change; indeed, anthropologist Ralph Linton argued:
Capacity for being bored, rather than man’s social or natural needs, lies at the root of cultural advance.
And it raises conversation to art. France’s first salon began in tedium, after a twelve-year-old Italian newlywed, the Marquise de Rambouillet, arrived in Paris in 1600, found nobody to talk to, and imported conversazione. Salons became sanctuaries from the dull court, salonnières became unbeatable talkers (excluding unmentionable courtesans, see Chapter 10), and grave topics flourished, inadvertently helping to finish off their stifling world. Shortly before the Revolution, the Prince de Ligne observed:
In salons these days one speaks of politics and finance where once one spoke of nothing but love.
WHAT MAKES A BORE?
Boredom has two causes: too much of something (overload renders all information equally meaningless) or too little. Similarly, there are two extremes of bore. At one end stand those besotted with their own voice; at the other cringe feeble, silent types.
Most conspicuous are the former, who draw all life and light to themselves and, like black holes, give none back. Disgraced media baron Conrad Black was a world-class attention thief. Blessed with an excellent memory, his social climbing consisted of courting famous people with lectures on history and current affairs (at dinner).
The latter sort, stealth borer, is subtler but no less selfish, so conversationally risk-averse that when persuaded to speak, he says effectively nothing: either clichés and platitudes (silence thinly disguised) or remarks that lead nowhere.
For instance, the stealth borer says, “Yes, I went to Japan once.”
You say (excited: first hard fact), “Did you! Where/When/Why?”
“Um. I forget/Ages ago/ Holiday.”
On a good day he’ll add, “It was nice.”
The antihero of Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby” is typical. “Pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, uncurably forlorn,” he replies to all requests
in a singularly mild, firm voice, “I would prefer not to.”
Don’t pity Bartleby. His bogus shyness is contempt, buried in a coy shrug. Stealth borers may find the rest of us boring. Talking to one of them is like putting coins in a slot machine that doesn’t even cough up the flashing lights.
It’s tempting to ignore bores, but switch off and the conversational circuitry soon breaks down. Hence creative solutions are preferable. I don’t say it’s easy. Bores aren’t good company, because it doesn’t occur to them that they’re anything less. Maligns sense no obligation to engage others’ interests; benigns fail to perceive that their interests aren’t universal. All inhabit a pre-Copernican universe, in which they are