A Calculating Bore

"A Calculating Bore" by Charles Battell Loomis is a satirical novel that explores the life of a man who becomes obsessively fascinated with mathematics and calculation to the point of absurdity. Through humor and wit, Loomis critiques the societal obsession with logic and numbers, revealing the eccentricities and quirks that arise from such fixation. The story is a witty commentary on the clash between intellectual pursuits and the human experience, blending elements of comedy and social critique.

• Short story

								
My friend Bings is one of those habitual calculators--one of the
kind that says if all the teeth that have been extracted since the
first dentist began business were to be used for paving purposes in
Hades, the good-resolutions contractor would be out of a job for ten
thousand years. He thinks in numbers, and if he were a minister he
would get all his texts from the same source.

The other day he saw me first on a ferry-boat, and immediately
buttonholed me. Said he: “How sad it is to think that so much labor
goes for naught!”

I knew that I was in for one of his calculations; but I also knew
that it would be useless to try to head him off.

He stroked his beard, and said, with an imitation of thoughtfulness:

“Every day in this Empire State one million human beings go to bed
tired because you and I and the rest leave butter on our plates and
don’t eat our crusts.”

I told him that I was astonished, but that he would have to elucidate.

“The farmers sow 8,000,000 bushels of useless grain,--grain that
eventually goes out to sea on the refuse-scows,--they milk 50,000
cows to no other purpose than to produce sour or spilled milk,
they allow their valuable hens to lay 1,654,800,001 eggs that will
serve no better purpose than to spatter some would-be Booth or lie
neglected in some out-of-the-way corner, while their wives are making
1,008,983 pounds of butter that will be left on the edges of plates
and thrown into the refuse-pail. If they didn’t sow the useless
grain, or fuss over the hens that lay the unused eggs, or draw the
milk that is destined to sour, or make the butter that is to ornament
the edges of the china disks, they would be able to go to bed merely
healthily tired instead of overworked, and fewer farmers would commit
suicide, and fewer farmers’ wives would go insane.”

His eyes gleamed, and I knew that, as he would put it, his pulse was
going so fast that if it were revolutions of a locomotive-wheel it
would take only so long to go somewhere.

“And what is your remedy for all this?” asked I, with becoming, if
mock, interest.

“Let us help ourselves to no more than we want at table, buy our eggs
a week earlier, drink our milk the day before, eat our bread before
it is too dry, and in six months’ time there will be a reduced State
death-rate, more vacancies in the insane asylums, 1,456,608 rosy
cheeks where to-day there are that many pale ones--”

Just then the ferry-boat’s gates were lifted, and as we went our
several ways, in the hurry that is characteristic of 7,098,111
Americans out of eight millions, I thought that, if all the brains of
all the arithmetical cranks were used in place of wood-pulp to make
into paper, we writers would get our pads for nothing.
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