AS TO BORES.
A little while ago I read in a paper the following scathing paragraph:
There is nothing so terrible as to be fairly well informed on a subject and have some unutterable bore come around and insist on pouring into your ear a mass of ill-digested misinformation on that subject.
There is nothing so terrible as to be fairly well informed on a subject and have some unutterable bore come around and insist on pouring into your ear a mass of ill-digested misinformation on that subject.
This looks profoundly, dismally true. It undoubtedly is. No, there is one thing more terrible, and that is to be conscious of being the bore.
The boree has been heard from frequently since the Renaissance, and his sentiments have undergone little change. The borer hasn’t had much to say for himself. Yet who can place his hand upon his heart and assert that he has never experienced what it is to be one? To have to be the victim of such, dear sir, is the payment the gods exact for the treasure of extraordinary learning. Nobody has a monopoly of advanced knowledge on this planet, but most of us are born ignorant and remain so until by the grace of heaven we become bores. The state of borehood is the chrysalis stage of the human intelligence, intermediate between grub and butterfly. The apple-borer has such a stage, so has the ordinary unqualified borer of urban life. He has eaten his modicum of the tough, indigestible portion of the tree of knowledge, and must undergo metamorphosis beforesipping the nectar of its fruit. The writer of my text may be an exception to this generalization, for clearly he never advanced from ignorance through the purgatory of borehood to celestial learning, or he would know how terrible it is to be an unutterable bore.
Alas, poor bore! Will nobody pray for you, or drop a pitying tear?
The bore we have always with us. He who would enjoy his superior culture in immunity from the eleemosynary appeals of spiritual mendicants should go into the desert and become a hermit and learn to say like the hermit in Homo Sum, nihil humanum alienum me puto. I do suspect, though, that the saint in question himself fled into the desert to avoid a bore. And that reminds me that a saint of my acquaintance was once called upon to help one of these spiritual apple-borers through the tough integuments of a theological cocoon. He received a visit from the painful creature about every day. How unutterably it must have bored him! But he never said so. At last the poor bore achieved wings and flew away into a Universalist orchard; and as there are few things about which people in general know so much that ain’t so as they do about the subject on which he is now well posted, he probably realizes how terrible it is to be the victim of the morally dyspeptic, misinformed or uninformed, unutterable bore.
But the man who has a mission to mankind can’t afford to be bored. Jesus Christ, who was, if anybody ever was, born with fine intuitions, on some subjects, that transcended any laboriously acquired knowledge, must have been the worst bored man in Palestine when his disciples came around and asked him such questions as who should be first in the kingdom of heaven, or the Sadducees propounded that conundrum about the woman with seven husbands. But instead of putting his unutterable boredom on record in a crisp text he answered their irritating questions in that sweetly wise way of his, which must, if anything could, have caused those poor souls to sprout wings.
He also said, whatsoever we would that men should do to us, we ought to do to them; and did not except bores.
Annie L. Mearkle.