The Irritable Tribe

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 785, 6 August 1954, Page 4

The Irritable Tribe

FINE collection of antipathies will be presented to listeners in Here’s My Discomfort, a_ series of talks announced on page 15 for early broadcasting. It is fortunate, perhaps, that the talks must be heard one at a time and at decent intervals: otherwise the catalogue of aversions might bear upon us a little too heavily. Somewhere, in the complaints of those’ six speakers, are the elements of portraits which must bégin to look suspiciously like ourselves. The little tricks and habits of speech, the minor affectations, the impulse to finish a sentence while someone leaves it too long in mid-air, the failure to remember names, the tidiness which becomes fussiness -or concealed aggression-when seen through other eyes: all these and many other items, choice and common, are listed in the broadcasts. It is evident that men and women, going innocently about their affairs, are leaving behind them a massive irritation of nerves. At the end of the series the subject is by no means exhausted. Something could still be said of the man who speaks in proverbs and platitudes, the wife who borrows her husband’s dressing gown and leaves it with the cuffs turned up, the person who expects a journalist to talk about nothing but the news -or talks prosody to a poet, a subject often unfamiliar to him-and the monster who sneezes without a handkerchief in a crowded and overheated railway carriage. . . Obviously there are so many things wrong with other people, or with what they do as they move about the earth, that it is quite wonderful to reflect on the relatively few cases of actual assault. There are, of course, some mitigating factors.

People do not have the same aversions; and dislikes that are shared have a fluctuating intensity. Chemical changes in the body, "as everybody knows"-a phrase which must certainly be somebody’s béte noire-can cause alarms in society and rage in heaven. But the weather is sometimes tranquil, inside and out; and the most irritable man on earth (he appears at least twice in the "Discomforts" series) must have his quieter moments. Some people are rather pleased to be known as good haters; they feel, perhaps, that it sharpens the outline of personality and keeps them reassuringly alive. Yet a great deal depends on what is hated. It is fair enough to be angered by malice, for it touches our feelings about human dignity, and the anger is partly a sympathy for the victim. But tricks of speech, or ways of handling knives and forks, are faults of innocence which should not be scorned. And although it is harmless, and perhaps necessary, to have scapegoats upon which to load private griefs and frustrations, the practice becomes sinister when it passes from things to persons, especially persons with whom we live and work. A small explosion now and then-as the six "Discomfort" speakers will cheerfully testify-is liberating. And if there is one thing worse than too much irritability, it is surely too little of the same weakness. The dance of life occurs mainly on a tightrope, and the best performer will take a tumble even when he thinks he has reached an adequate balance. Never to fall, however, is to be perfect; and perfection, if we could meet it in this world, would unite us in a supreme and consuming aversion.