Melancholy has its Robert Burton (author of The Anatomy of Melancholy), Snobbery has its Thackeray (author of The Book of Snobs), but Boredom, a much more capacious field than either, has no one similar. Boredom needs help. It awaits its Linnaeus, the great taxonomist, someone to classify the bores now walking the earth in such plenitude.
Many are the kinds of bores, even though in the end their dark and dampening effect is everywhere the same. Some days, it seems, they all call me. I am a magnet for bores. I have large ears that stick out, and quite possibly bores sense they make excellent receptacles into which to pour their soporific verbal potions. I have been told that I am a good listener. I am not sure that this is true, but at least in conversation I tend not to break in, which is perhaps a weakness. Whatever the case, bores find me, and go about their charmless work, leaving me, some days, feeling quite as assailed by bores as Henry James was said to be assailed by perceptions.
As to how they bore me, let me count only a few of the ways. I have among my acquaintanceship a number of what I call Solipsistic Bores. These are bores who, whatever the subject up for discussion, turn it to themselves. “I have to be tested for liver cancer,” you announce. “I think I may have dandruff,” the Solipsistic Bore replies, a worried look upon his face. Solipsistic Bores suffer — or, more likely, they enjoy — the Copernican Complex: They believe that the solar system rotates around them. Lucky fellows, self-love in them never goes unrequited.
I do a fairly brisk commerce with what I think of as Good-Parent Bores. The Good-Parent Bore makes plain how much time he is investing in his children. He can be counted on, before long, to point out how splendidly it’s paying off by bragging about these children. One of my Good-Parent Bores bragged for years about his first-born son’s athletic prowess. He had a great arm, he could hit anything that was thrown at him, he was headed for the Show for sure. When this didn’t pan out — didn’t really come close to panning out — my Good-Parent Bore switched attention to his second son, a boy who is an astonishment of intellectual precocity, it seems. Took calculus in pre-school, broke the bank on the SATs, read Proust at 14. My heart goes out to these children — and also to myself for having to listen to these too proud parents.
I run into more than my share of Professor’s-Disease Bores. In what other job but teaching, it has been said, can a man talk for 50 minutes straight without being interrupted by his wife? The Professor’s-Disease Bores do not so much converse as deliver lectures. They have had a captive audience for too long. They mistake their small power over students for charm. They think everyone must want to know the five reasons for the Renaissance. Village explainers all, may they acquire white-lung disease from being around so much chalk.
Failed-Wit Bores are among the most difficult with whom I have to deal. These are fellows — they are always men, never women — who seem to believe that I go in for their turgid irony. A Failed-Wit Bore I run into on the street likes to fill me in on his latest aphorisms. I would provide an example, but I have blocked them all out. What I cannot block out is the look of deep self-approval that accompanies his delivery of these inept verbal contraptions. As I hear him out, I fear the franchise-donut-like glaze that must be in my eyes.
My-Brilliant-Career Bores like to tell me how very well they are doing. Onward and upward, that’s how it always goes for them, bought the right stock, sold the house just as the market peaked, yo, the Viagra is doing its job, amazing stuff. They don’t so much talk as make progress reports. Often, at the end of these reports, they might query, “Everything okay with you?” I sometimes want to reply, “Not bad, if only I can just get this boa constrictor off my neck,” since they aren’t really listening anyway.
Of Single-Subject Bores, I encounter Obsessed-with-Clinton Bores, But-Is-It-Good-for-the-Jews? Bores, Diet-and-Fitness Bores, the Past-Was-Infinitely-Better-than-the-Present Bores — Johnny One Notes all, who somehow can’t even manage to play that one note on key. You don’t know what a sinking feeling is — but then perhaps you do — when, just as you’re about to sit down to dinner, the phone rings, you pick it up, and, through the static of his car phone, you hear your Obsessed-with-Clinton Bore begin the next installment of his unending tirade on our Saintly Billy.
I could go on — my happy bores do — to mention the Grievance-Collector Bores, the Let-Me-Tell-You-My-Dreams Bores, the Freudian Bores, and Slipping-Standards or Decline-and-Fall Bores, ah so many fine bores, and so little — damn these bores — so very little time.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
