n no one's keeping: it is banged from side
to side, adjusted to the right and adjusted to the left, a fine screw
put on it every now and then to send it sheer into the great void and
chaos! And almost the saddest part of the business is that the
defacements and tramplings which the poor subject (who knows, perhaps
very sacred to some one of us?) is made to suffer, come not from our
opponent's brutal thrusting forward of _his_ meaning, but rather from
our own desperate methods to hold tight, to place _our_ meaning in
safety, somewhere where, even if not recognized, it will at least not be
mauled.... Such are the scuffles and scrimmages of the most temperate,
intellectual conversations, leaving behind them for the moment not a
twig, not a blade of the decent vegetation of the human soul. Cannot we
get some great beneficent mechanic to invent some spiritual cement,
some asphalt and gravel of nothingness, some thoroughly pneumatic
intellectual balls, whereon, and also wherewith, we privileged creatures
may harmlessly expend our waste dialectic energies?

Then, would you never talk? Or would you confine talking to the weather
or the contents of the public prints? Would you have our ideas get hard
and sterile for want of being moved? Do you advise that, like some
tactful persons we--you--yes, _you_--all know and detest--we
systematically let every subject drop as soon as raised?

There! the talking has begun. They are at it, contradicting what they
agree with, and asking definitions of what they perfectly understand. Of
course not! And here I am, unable to resist, rushing into the argument,
excited--who can tell?--perhaps delighted. And by the time we take up
our bedroom candles, and wish each other good night (with additional
definitions over the banisters) every scrap of sensible meaning I ever
had will be turned to nonsense; and I shall feel, next morning, oh, how
miserably humiliated and depressed!...

"Well--and to return to what we were saying last night...."

IN PRAISE OF SILENCE

One of the truths which come (if any do) with middle age, is the gradual
recognition that in one's friendly intercourse the essential--the one
thing needful--is not what people say, but what they think and feel.

Words are not necessarily companionable, far from it; but moods truly
meet, to part in violent dissonance; or to move parallel in happy
harmonic intervals; or, more poignant and more satisfying still, to pass
gradually