The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [48]
In essence, they lack nerve endings, like Christopher Monkton, third viscount of Brenchley, a conundrum of a man, who lost a million pounds on his (he thought) “insoluble” Eternity puzzle, yet seems immune to embarrassment:
[He] talks with irrepressible good humour and impervious authority on this and any other subject I raise, from the Forestry Commission (spectacularly incompetent) to the Guardian (ditto). He laughs without restraint at his own anecdotes. He is not a man, you might say, who seems plagued by self-doubt.
Funny as bores may be in retrospect, talking to them presents conversation’s highest challenge: to make the bore interesting.
First, diagnose the boredom, including your role in it.
At root, the bore is someone you don’t want to listen to. Although there are therefore as many varieties as people to be bored by, the structure of every boring conversation is basically the same: a conflict of interest played out as hostage situation.
Boredom fills the deficit between the attention a speaker demands and the interest he commands. The more intrusive the bore, the less entranced you are, the more confinement chafes—pain magnified a thousandfold if you’re stuck.
Contextual variables—loud music, hunger, tiredness, bad temper, urgent desire for a pee—play their part. And of course, although someone may look bored, eyelids droop for many reasons. Telepathy has a way to go, but when conversation stagnates, we may interpret the signs and make a judicious guess as to whether we’re with an unresponsive Bartleby, or ourselves acting the part of an impervious Black.
➺ Rule one: Read the listener
Be reasonably confident your listeners’ interest is lost if:
They reply with monosyllables, random comments, new subjects, silence.
Their eyes wander or assume a fish-on-slab glaze.
They glower, never nod, keep twitching their watch cuffs.
You find yourself repeating yourself.
Chains of “reallys” are not dialogue. And don’t be encouraged if their tone lends “Hmm” a sleepy question mark (translation: “Like I care?”).
Barring sleep, physical clues to listener fatigue are ambiguous. Some people pitch forward when they’re interested, but settling back also equals settling in for a meaty chat. Whatever body language experts claim, crossed arms signal concentration or fed-up-ness as much as defensiveness, and one girl’s eager grin is another’s clenched, mute “God, you’re weird.” There is no universal grammar.
Reading ennui is not an exact science, more a descriptive art. As logically it can only be, given that boredom—an instinct for social survival, evolved over countless generations—makes itself known first in feeling. Nonetheless it is amenable to analysis, which offers clues to how to fight it. By way of experiment, if you’re really bored, divide the minutes a person takes up (T) by your level of interest in what they have to say (I) (from a low of 1 to a high of 10). This is their Tedium Index (T/I). The higher the number, the greater the bore.
There is a further nuance, in that most people’s interest rate, however high it soars initially, will deflate with time.
➺ Rule two: Keep it brief
Sadly, listening talent is on the wane, with patience in dwindling supply. So if your listener looks tired, or your Guinness is still brimming, its foam flat, and everyone else’s glass is half-empty, shut up. Every subject has its use-by date.
SHUT-UP TEST:
Imagine you’re soft-boiling a modest egg.
Have you talked more than three minutes?
This better be a great dinosaur egg of a fascinating topic.
Stick to the point. If they want more, they’ll ask.
This advice may puzzle raconteurs who believe themselves marvelous conversationalists—writers and actors in particular. The likes of Gore Vidal and Peter Ustinov are lionized for their ability to sustain lengthy anecdotes. Personally, I’d rather eat glass than sit next to them. Virginia Woolf, too, was a conversational dominatrix. Her biographer writes, apparently approvingly, of her amazing
flights of fancy, her wonderful