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| Sunday, 22 January 2006 |
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Gossip of the gutter by Ephrem Fernando Gossip is harmless talk. But 'noblest things find vilest using' in the hands of those Charles Darwin asserted only recently learnt to walk on their hind legs. The gossip is harmless say at a wedding where a flood of small talk is let loose with volumes of charitable hopes that the children may be blessed with better brains than their father and less stupidity than their mother. But when there is a-mixture of detraction and prophecy then gossip is not a pious confabulation but a deadly vice. There are many varieties in the Gossip kingdom. The club gossip is a good hearted but a empty headed gas bag, talking incessantly in a kindly bird witted, scatter-brained way of all sorts and conditions of men. He cannot talk of subjects scientific, literary or historical for he is habitually stupid and knows nothing about them. His talk is about what such a one has done, is doing, is about to do, would do or will do. He repeats all he hears with no greater perception of the fitness of time or place than he is of colours in the dark. That in early life he was a pious Oblate but has now lost his faith and travels in mufti. How the parson ran away with the vicar's daughter. He is nevertheless free from guile or malice as he is free from common sense or discernment of what in men or things is credible, probable or possible. He is filled with dumbest boasting that all consult him, tell him everything, do nothing without him. Invited for lunch at 'Temple Trees' was unable to go being sent for by the 'White House'. He buzzes on amiably the bluebottle of social life. The most despicable in Gossipdom are those who sit in alleys producing sheets that have no tradition for truth and decency what a connoisseur would call a rag. Of this kind there are two sorts, men who murder the reputation of others and women who throw vitriol over it. Their cauliflower ears are wide open to catch all the stale rubbish in the world. Their ears are spread even while they doze like the nets of bat-folders. Nothing escapes. Their brains have acids they use to concentrate falsehoods. They have not sufficient of either the eternal or transient to excite curiosity or make them conscious of the social explosions, earthquakes, conflagrations they are causing. The laws against arson ought to be extended to such incendiaries, as they are liars with gaping ears, itching tongues and wandering wits, never sure of what they hear and never accurate in what they repeat. They magnify and multiply and put carts before horses, and all things upside down. They invent, invert, supplement with theories and explanations of their own the words and actions of decent men. They are what the Italians call uomo fictos, living fictions. Having none of their own they are reckless of the name, feelings and dignity of others. They are dangerous as companions and still more dangerous as friends. In them the malignant and the mendacious meet in one block head and a miserable block head it is. |
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