Silence is unnatural to man. He begins life with a cry and ends it in stillness. In between he does all he can to make a noise in the world, and he fears silence more than anything else. Even his conversation is an attempt to prevent a fearful silence. If he is introduced to another person, 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 (喋喋不休的人). He knows that ninety-nine percent of human conversation means no more than the buzzing of a fly, but he is anxious to join in the buzz and to prove that he is a man and not a waxwork figure (蜡塑人像).
The aim 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 annoying as the continuous noise made by a mosquito. But at a dinner party one would rather be a mosquito than a quiet person. Most buzzing, fortunately, is pleasant to the ear, and some of it is pleasant even to the mind. He would be a foolish man if he waited until he had a wise thought to take part in the buzzing with his neighbors.
Those who hate to pick up the weather as a conversational opening seem to me not to know the reason why human beings wish to talk. Very few human beings join in a conversation in the hope of learning anything new. Some of them are satisfied if they are only allowed to go on making a noise into other people's ears, though they have nothing to tell them except that they have seen two or three new plays or that they had food in a Swiss hotel. At the end of an evening during which they have said nothing meaningful for a long time, they just prove themselves to be successful conversationists.
