Democratic Sentinel, Volume 7, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 February 1883 — All Age of Monologue. [ARTICLE]

All Age of Monologue.

. “There is no comfort in talking nowadays,” sighed a nice old lady, recently; “even the best-bred people interrupt so that one can never finish anything. Everybody wants to talk, but nobody is willing to listen.” Perhaps the inattention of her hearers to some pet story had ruffled the speaker’s usually placid humor, and undoubtedly she stated the ease somewhat strongly, but there is unfortunately far too much truth in her remark that in these days everybody wants to talk and nobody to listen. ’ It is partly because it is an age of prolific, if not always profound thought, and the simplest of our acquaintances are seething with ideas that jostle each other in their eagerness to come to utterance. For the most part these ideas, like Dr. Holmes’ moral, run at large, qnd are caught from the air, but none the less do they compel speech, and the result that conversation has well nigh become a lost art, and we live in an age of monologue. Two or more people sit down together, and each utters his monologue, more or less brilliant, as the case may be, paying no especial heed to the words of his companion, and only in the faintest degree modified by them. Epigram, anecdote, simile apd wise observations are poured out to unheeding ears, not for the sake of being heard, but for the sake of utterance. We have become like so many Cassandras, and bear about the burden of prophecy with ah inward necessity of declaring it which is mightier than we. We read, we talk, but how seldom do we listen.— Boston Courier.