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A Talkative Recluse
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (April 6, 1912) : 24
Purdue copy/scan (hathitrust) : link
 

      If one is by force of circumstances something of a recluse and by nature somewhat garrulous the result on society is almost cataclysmic. One combines pitilessness with helplessness. There is no altruism, control, or sense of the fitness of things left in one, and with these traits temporarily removed one bears a horrid resemblance to a cross between fanatic and bore. The assembled human beings are nothing more than means of relieving one’s congested verbal store. One hardly knows and barely cares whether any one is listening or interested; one only sees in the frenzy of one’s need a vacant ear and still vacanter face and pours over them the stream of ideas that has been dammed into the pond of family life and longs for the rush forward along an unknown course. There is a vague regret that one is talking eugenics to a hunting man, as he does not seem in the least to like it, and it is possible that there is some one present who would stand it better. But the regret is not great. It pales beside the realization that you have something you want to say and a helpless polite being who has to listen. On you go, not wholly wanting to — in fact, rather exhausted and dismayed, but so filled to the brim with exchangeable matter that the slight jar of contact is more than sufficient to inundate all around you.
      Subconsciously you know that you are behaving as inconveniently as though you were upsetting furniture with every breath. You hear the tinkle of breaking china as your unexercised garrulity revels in its opportunity. You hear the tinkle of breaking china as your unexercised garrulity revels in its opportunity. You fear your hostess may be as embarrassed as though she had invited a Russian revolutionist by mistake. You are grieved that you cannot assist the tentative attempts made by your listeners to crawl from under the fusillade of expressiveness with which you are peppering them. They look so surprised and innocent of having done anything to provoke such treatment. In time you may be able to apologize. In fact, after a while you do beam gratefully and silently at them, so comforted by the emptied sensation inside that you would willingly be friends on any terms they name, but by that time they know you for a terrible creature and they avoid you skittishly, with the wariness of an escaped listener.
      Our social self is so refractory a thing to manage. It thrives on usage, and instead of diminishing with wear creditably augments the greater the demands on it. A vacation of a year, instead of refreshing it, is grasped by it as a chance to relapse into barbarism, and when it is again called into use it is found to be gauche and jerky in its actions, half violent, half abstracted, so anti-social and egotistic that it listens when interested, talks on what interests it, and at all other times sinks into self-absorption. It has forgotten the values in amenable exchange, it assaults with dogmatic statements and robs with point-blank questions. It sleeps in public like any yokel and shocks public delicacy by neglecting to conform to public modesty by covering its beliefs with deferential ineptitudes. It has become so accustomed to smiling inwardly that it omits smiling outwardly and presents a face of paralyzing blankness. Grown used to the companionship of one person, the sudden encounter of varied personalities causes it to behave like a tousled boy in new clothes, pleased, exhilarated, but stiffly smiling and rooted for safety to one spot, unable to do more than throw blushing grins about on objects blurred by their multiplicity.
      There is but one virtue in the situation, and even that is a divided one. An accidental recluse, returned suddenly to social contact, has the sensitiveness of a convalescent. He receives impressions with the same painful, feverish, exquisite keenness, so that he is divided between a consuming hunger to live and a fear that if he takes a single independent step he will break into a thousand pieces. He is jarred by discords into petulant aversions and thrilled by sympathies into taut silences. His too great intensity puts him at a disadvantage, and he is abashed at the sturdy humdrumness of those about him. By having been for a time not of the world, he feels it so vividly on returning to it that he finds himself for the moment incapable of using it and breathlessly marvels by what handle one can safely grasp so swiftly whirling a wheel.
      Society is the churning process we all need. Taken in too great doses, it smooths our surfaces to rather limited if brilliant reflectors. Taken moderately, it grinds us against our fellows with the least bruising all round, making our contour just sufficiently conformable so that we are not inefficiently at variance. Yet, often as this conclusion has been come to, it is difficult to make oneself believe that man is really a social animal. Yet, often as this conclusion has been come to, it is difficult to make oneself believe that man is really a social animal. Society bears so many marks of being an artificially acquired taste. We rail at it when we are in it, we long for it when deprived of it, we are stifled or intoxicated by it, so unpractised are we in our use of it after all these centuries. We rend it fiercely, following a savage instinct to annihilate all that is foreign to our understanding. We lose our heads in it as though it were pristinely novel. We disguise ourselves when we enter it as though it were so unexplored as still to require precautions against unguessed-at dangers. We talk about it as if it still surprised us; we write about it with an inevitability that alone declares it old.
 

8 August 2026