A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE


Why do we go on talking? It is a serious question, one on which the
happiness of thousands depends. For there is no more wearing social demand
than that of compulsory conversation. All day long we must either talk,
or--dread alternative--listen. Now, that were very well if we had
something to say, or our fellow-sufferer something to tell, or, best of
all, if either of us possessed the gift of clothing the old commonplaces
with charm. But men with that great gift are not to be met with in every
railway-carriage, or at every dinner. The man we actually meet is one
whose joke, though we have signalled it a mile off, we are powerless to
stop, whose opinions come out with a whirr as of clockwork. Besides, it
always happens in life that the man--or woman--with whom we would like to
talk is at the next table. Those who really have something to say to each
other so seldom have a chance of saying it.

Why, oh why, do we go on talking? We ask the question in all seriousness,
not merely in the hope of making some cheap paradoxical fun out of the
answer. It is a cry from the deeps of ineffable boredom.

Is it to impart information? At the best it is a dreary ideal. But, at any
rate, it is a mistaken use of the tongue, for there is no information we
can impart which has not been far more accurately stated in book-form.
Even if it should happen to be a quite new fact, an accident happily rare
as the transit of Venus--a new fact about the North Pole, for
instance--well, a book, not a conversation, is the place for it. To talk