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by humble thumbs.
    Becoming a bore is far from a simple, simultaneous decline of the mental and sensory faculties. On the contrary: some are unhealthilyheightened. As one’s stock of anecdotes and topics dwindles to a precious few, one’s ability to relate these obsessive subjects to a running conversation increases. It is truly astounding with what ease the mind of the bore creates an illusory relevance! If, as has been said, the mark of the rational mind is the ability to perceive connections between unlike things, then the bore is truly in the forefront of rational beings. For instance: I am oppressed by a peculiar vague emotion, or circular set of propositions, about my home town that, boiled down to its essence, might go as follows: “It seems extraordinary to me that the town where I was born, and spent all my formative years, had nothing extraordinary about it. Yet is not this, in a sense, extraordinary?” Not that I ever state it so baldly. My effort to unburden myself of this strange message usually takes the form of a sentence beginning, “In the town where I grew up,” and going on to describe some innocuous condition like the way the mailman walked up one side of the street and then down the other. Non-bores can have no conception of how many opportunities I perceive in the course of an hour to intrude this kind of information. A conversation on, say, cybernetics seems to my deranged but active brain an immense sieve full of holes crying to be plugged with a sentence beginning, “In the town where I grew up.” The glaze on the faces around me is no longer a deterrent, since that particular varnish is applied now the moment I enter a room. I am indifferent to it; I am indifferent to sniggers, to yawns, to the creeping net of ostracism that is tightening around me and my family. There is one delight left in my life, one music toward whose enchanted strains my whole being is bent. My throat itches, my larynx inflates with air, my tongue contorts; and I am drowned in bubbling syllables of bliss.
    Yet, between the luminous day of normality and the ecstatic night of boringness there exists a twilight, brief for some, agonizingly long for others, in which the sufferer flitters ambiguously among phantasmal shapes of embarrassment and shame. While his tongue happily lopes along, a remote corner of his mind involuntarily observes the dismal effects he is producing; in intervals of extreme lucidity he is even bored himself. It is in such a twilit moment that I have sat down to pen, before the black curtain falls finally, these hasty words, this quick cry. In the town where I grew up.… [
The remaining hundred and eighty thousand words of the confession, while of indubitable interest to the specialist, are well in excess of the needs of the general reader
.]

  THE UNREAD BOOK ROUTE
    I MAGINE TWO RECTANGLES , representing the first and second stories of my home. Each contains an angular flux, clockwise and counterclockwise respectively, of arrows, lettered, at various elbows, A through G. This is the unread book route. Over the last eighteen months I have charted it by means of patient observation, phosphorescent tracing dyes, electronically tripped cameras, factory-tuned logarithmic tables, and some inspired—as they say in the scientific quarterlies—guesswork. While I dare not claim for my investigations an importance equal to the more publicized researches of the I.G.Y. (researches that have conclusively demonstrated, according to my reading of
Life
, that the ionosphere is shaped like a macaroni’s cravat, that the continents are merely large irregular cherries in a wobble of silicon Jell-O, and that the Pacific Ocean bulges toward Tahiti whenever you leave the hot water running), nevertheless The Unread Book Route is one more piece fitted into the puzzle of the mysterious and irresistible currents that do so much to make our terrestrial existence discomfiting.
    The books enter at A, which is the letter slot.