罗伯特·林德/Robert Lynd
The worst bores, I sometimes think, are those who love telling people the various routes from one place to another. I have never been more bored in my life than when listening to an old gentleman explaining to an old lady the several ways in which she might have come from Notting Hill Gate to Hampstead. She had complained of the time the journey had taken and immediately he was off on a long rigmarole consisting of the number of buses and the frames of streets and stations. He went on in a flat voice conducting her, as it seemed to me, through every street in west and north London. He told her of all the various places where she might have changed buses and named most of the public-houses on the way. In the end, it seemed to me, he was boring himself as well as the rest of us; but he dared not stop, I fancy, because he could think of nothing else to talk about. By the time he rose to go I was in a coma with words like Camden High Street, Prince of Wales Road and Britannia jostling each other in my brain.
Another boring form of conversation is that of the man who, when talking politics, trots out all the old threadbare arguments with the air of a person using them for the first time. I have been a bore of this kind myself. As a boy I was blind enough to regard Mr. Gladstone's proposal of Home Rule for Ireland as both dangerous and wicked, and, whenever I met a great friend of mine who was a Home Ruler, I would drag the conversation round to the great theme. I shouted the wildest nonsense into his ear as I walked beside him in the streets, telling him with blazing eyes of all the good England had done to Ireland and yelling all the usual musty quotations from the Pre-Home-Rule Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt. Not once did I use an original argument, for I knew none. I was merely an infuriated parrot, speaking out of the richest store of ignorance conceivable. Signs of distress on his patient face could not stop me; but one day, driven beyond endurance, he turned to me with a slight flush and said quietly, "My God, what a bore you are!" Now no one likes to be thought a bore, and it is difficult to go on arguing with a man who tells you that you are boring him. To realize that one is boring somebody is to become a pricked balloon. I certainly did. La Roche-foucauld tells us that "we can forgive those who bore us, but we cannot forgive those whom we bore," yet, after the first moment of shock, I never liked my friend the less for his candour. Since then I must have bored many people; but outside the family circle no one has since told me that I was boring them. I have to study the expression on their faces to know……