The Art of Conversation - Catherine Blyth [51]
Sociologist Max Weber compared ideas to railroad switchmen, able to redirect a culture’s evolution. I’d add that they fuel the engine. Why not attack a monologist’s monoculture with a virus: a fresh idea? Just don’t thump invisible lecterns or neglect to observe your listener: Ask yourself, is this news to him?
Teasing may also throw bores off their well-worn tracks. I watched a self-important politician melt when a flirt tweaked his ruddy nose. Still, gently does it. If cheeky courtiers quickened the pulse of their jaded patrons, some went too far. The earl of Rochester, Charles II’s on-off favorite, got the boot for this squib:
God bless our good and gracious King
Whose promise none relyes on
Who never said A foolish thing
Nor ever did A wise one.
But the king soon fetched him back. Life grew too dull. (How could he do without the man who began a poem “Her father gave her Dildoes six?”)
➺ Rule eight: Use the difficulty
Don’t forget, a little learning can be a fun thing, sprinkled on the right company.
As the anthropologist said, boredom spurs invention. Follow the example of novelist Sir Walter Scott and milk for information:
There are few persons from whom you cannot learn something, and . . . everything is worth knowing.
The exception, in my experience, being an aficionado of Swiss fridge magnets. (The cow, when you wagged its tail—guess what? It went moo.)
Still, as your bore talks you through his client list for the umpteenth time, try to capitalize on this opportunity to polish conversation skills. If he’s exceptionally nasty, you could play Outbore the Bore, doing unto him what he has done to you. But I doubt he’d notice, and you’d soon bore yourself.
Is boredom ever a virtue? Psychotherapist Adam Phillips reckons it’s a “developmental achievement” and that adults are “oppressive” to demand that children
should be interested. . . . Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.
Perhaps he’s right, we’re too quick to cry “bore.” We entertainment-rich consumerists are all a bit like Charles II: We demand to be amused.
Recently I took a train from London to Bath, in the designated family carriage. Most passengers read or snoozed. But one boy whined and moaned, all the way to Bath. The same boy whose top-drawer laptop computer delighted everyone else with top-volume war-game noise, all the way to Bath.
Every so often his parents told him to shut up and play his game, then went back to their books.
The elderly lady opposite me muttered, “He needs a good talking to.”
We exchanged a grimace, went back to our books.
In retrospect, I feel sorry for that boy: unable to amuse himself, and his parents acting as if this was solely his problem. Couldn’t they have talked and played together?
Adam Phillips might argue that he needed to be ignored.
Believe me, I tried. I should have talked to the old lady instead.
➺ Rule nine: Closed minds are bored minds
The rough manners today bewilder older generations. Grannies lament the toys kids are given—when we were young, they say, we made our own fun. Old bores?
They know far better than TV-drenched we how to tell stories, take turns, listen.
Then again, in her old age, Rebecca West had unforgiving memories of meeting Nobel laureate W. B. Yeats, who “boomed at you like a foghorn.” The younger writer had far preferred frisking with other young writers present, and decades later remained astonished that
Yeats wouldn’t join in, until we fussed round and were nice to him. . . . What he liked was solemnity.
Yes, even in her dotage, it didn’t occur to West that the grand old man of letters might justifiably expect these literary whippersnappers to be interested in what he had