Silence is unnatural¹ to man. He begins life with a cry and ends it in stillness. In the interval² he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and there are few things of which he stands in more fear than of the absence of noise. Even his conversation is in great measure a desperate attempt to prevent a dreadful silence. If he is introduced to a fellow mortal and a number of pauses occur in the conversation, he regards himself as a failure, a worthless person, and is full of envy of the emptiest headed chatterbox. He knows that ninety-nine percent of human conversation means no more than the buzzing of a fly, but he longs to join in the buzz and to prove that he is a man and not a wax-work figure. The object of conversation is not, for the most part, to communicate ideas: it is to keep up the buzzing sound. There are, it must be admitted, different qualities of buzz: there is even a buzz that is as exasperating³ as the continuous ping of a mosquito. But at a dinner-party one would rather be a mosquito than a mute. Most buzzing, fortunately, is agreeable to the ear, and some of it is agreeable even to the mind. He would be a foolish man, however, who waited until he had a wise thought to take part in the buzzing with his neighbors. Those who despise the weather as a conversational⁴ opening seem to me to be ignorant of the reason why human beings wish to talk. Very few human beings join in a conversation in the hope of learning anything new. At the end of an evening during which they have said nothing at immense length, they justly plume⁵ themselves on their success as conversationalists.