'The Worst of Bores'

One of the unexpected rewards of retirement has been a serious reduction in the number of bores in my life. Universities are infested with people who take themselves very seriously. Couple that with arcane academic specialties, undergrown senses of humor and advanced political thinking and you have an epidemic of tedium. Exceptions? Of course. I know some very bright, conversationally gifted people on campus as well. Theodore Dalrymple diagnoses the bore with precision: 

“Of course, the true bore, like the true eccentric, doesn’t know or even suspect that that is what he is. The eccentric does strange things because to him they are the most natural things in the world to do. The true bore doesn’t know that he is boring others because what he says is so very interesting to himself, which is why at dinner parties my wife sometimes has to kick me under the table.”

 

In Max Beerbohm: A Kind of a Life (2002), N. John Hall tells us the essayist read the transcript of a radio broadcast, “The Road to Happiness,” by that well-known, high-minded bore Bertrand Russell: “Russell is a bore; but he is a bright bore, which is the worst of bores.”