Trained aversion
Posted by P S
02/12/2009
On the train to London, I wonder why so many people trouble to walk all the way along the train to reach the Quiet Carriage, just to conduct their telephone conversations there. One man, with a fairly middle-class voice but looking like a bit of a geezer, begins doing so a few seats behind me.
I was idly fantasising about defenestration when the train manager, astonishingly, made some attempt to enforce the policy of discouraging mobile phone use, which stimulated the fellow to leap from his seat and march towards the exit, bellowing that a very rude man – a very rude man! – had told him that he shouldn’t continue his conversation because he appeared to be in the Quiet Carriage. It was alright for other people to talk but not him. A very rude man! He was leaving the carriage because of that rude man.
‘It is a melancholy consideration,’ Boswell recalled Samuel Johnson’s remarking, ‘that so much of our time is necessarily to be spent upon the care of living, and that we can seldom obtain ease in one respect but by resigning it in another; yet I suppose we are by this dispensation not less happy in the whole, than if the spontaneous bounty of Nature poured all that we want into our hands. A few, if they were thus left to themselves, would, perhaps, spend their time in laudable pursuits; but the greater part would prey upon the quiet of each other, or, in the want of other objects, would prey upon themselves.’
Laudable pursuits, mmm. What measure of agreement about such things might be achievable these days?
Of the many mobile phone conversation that I’ve been forced to overhear, I can’t recall one that sounded remotely interesting. Perhaps I’ve just been unlucky. Unlucky, that is, within my unluckiness of having to hear the damned things at all. Is it a simple case of inverse proportion? The louder it is, the less interesting it is? Or because it’s only one side of it? Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s just aversion. I rarely overhear a conversation, between two or more people, that doesn’t, in some way, to some extent, pique my interest.
Pique. Aversion. Pique aversion. Peak aversion? Peek a version?
Wordplay is surely one of those laudable pursuits.