ON GARRULOUSNESS
|502 B| When philosophy undertakes to cure garrulity it has a difficult and intractable case in hand. The remedy is reason, which requires that the patient should listen. But the garrulous person |C| does not listen, for he is always talking. Herein lies the first trouble with an inability to keep silent; it means an inability to listen. It is the deliberate deafness of a person who appears to find fault with nature for giving him two ears and only one tongue. Euripides is, of course, right when he says of the unintelligent hearer:
I cannot fill a man who cannot hold
My wise words, poured and poured in unwise ears.
But there is more reason to say of the babbler:
I cannot fill a man who takes not in
My wise words, poured and poured in unwise ears,
—or rather poured over them, since he talks though you do |D| not listen, and refuses to listen when you talk. For even if, thanks to some ebb in his loquacity, he does listen for a moment, he immediately makes up for it several times over.
There is a colonnade at Olympia which reverberates a single utterance time after time, and is therefore known as the ‘Seven-Voiced’. Say but the least thing to set garrulity sounding, and it immediately dins you with its echoes:
Stirring the strings o’ the mind that none should stir.