I am sick of the salon-like groups who gather for the purpose of thinking aloud and then forget to think and make up for it in noises. Monotonous varieties, dropping pop-bottle gems from their lips, each individual amusing and delighting himself beyond all understanding with his sterile loquaciousness. Here in the salon groups, the discursive congregations which come together in all manner of odd places and all manner of regular places, garrulity approaches torture. Here the professional discourser flops and waddles about in his own Utopia. He doesn’t crave understanding but attention. As for truth, as for taking the pains to express his innermost reactions to a subject, this is impossible. The discourser doesn’t know what he thinks, doesn’t know what the truth is until he starts discoursing. And then he discourses himself into a state of mind. I have heard him discourse himself into the most startling convictions; into matrimony and out of it into religion and out of it, into and out of every variety of damn-foolishness imaginable. Persons who use written words instead of spoken words as the parents of their thought suffer from the same hypnosis. But in writing this is commendable. It is commendable for a writer to be insincere if he can be more logical and enlightening as a result. The result may be _De Profundis_ or _Alice in Wonderland_. It is my notion that men are sincere only in their appetites. A man craves food and woman and other stimulants with unquestionable sincerity. But in the realm of thought I have arrived at the conclusion that sincerity is an inspired and not inspiring condition of the mind. I am sick of the blaa-blaaing hordes, from the smirking “supes” of the let’s-adjourn-to-the-other-room species to the simpering cacophonists of the Schöngeist nobility. I am sick of the open mouths, the trailing sentences dying from weakness, the painstaking use of wrong words and the painstaking use of correct words; of the stagnated humor of deodorous sallies. I am sick of the Argumentatives, people with an irritating command of phrases, who balance paradoxes on their noses and talk backwards or upside down with equal lucidity; who must be contradicted or they suffer; who rumble bizarrely from the depths of every philosophical sub-cellar they can ferret out in order to be startling; who shriek and howl and wail and protest and—the Devil take them—tell the truth and make it impossible to believe. Their only reason for talking is to impress. They are as noisy as cannon and as effective as firecrackers. I am sick of the delicate, searching souls who prick themselves with their own words, who operate on fly specks, who grope and search and struggle for fine and truthful things, who deal in verbal shadings intelligible only to themselves—and then not for what they said but for what they meant to say or desired to say or wouldn’t say for the world.