I’ve reminded my sons with tedious regularity that the world is densely populated with boring people and boring situations. Think of advertising, PowerPoint, golf, Marxists, super-hero movies, activists of any stripe, videogames and the novels of Joseph McElroy. That each of these phenomena has its enthusiasts merely confirms the perversity of human nature. None of them, however, compels me to be bored. I’m not willing to concede that much power to those who wish to be tiresome. Jules Renard concurs. In a journal entry dated September 5, 1893, he writes:
“I am never
bored, no matter where I find myself: to be bored is to insult oneself.”
When someone
tells me how bored he is, I feel embarrassed for him. How can he admit such a
thing? It’s like saying, “I am helplessly stupid.” When John Berryman writes “Life,
friends, is boring,” he seems not to realize he is contributing to the world’s stockpile
of boring things. He comes off sounding like an adolescent trying on stylized acedia.
The great Colombian aphorist Nicolás Gómez Dávila – aka Don Colacho – left us
two complementary aperçus on the subject. First, “Books are not tools of perfection but
barricades against boredom.” When I’m reading a good book, one that induces
self-forgetting, I can’t be bored. And second: “When technical solutions become
perfect, man will die of boredom.” This has obvious applications today,
especially with the silly, anti-human fashion
for artificial intelligence.
[The
observation by Renard can be found in Journal
1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, 2020).]
Theodore Dalrymple, These Spendthrift Pages (2023) p.1
ReplyDelete"Pascal said that much of the trouble of mankind came from the inability of people to be at peace alone in a room. Much of its boredom (an underestimated mischief-maker) derives from its inability to find satisfaction in a shelf of books."