The State of Being Bored

I

MESSRS. H. W. and F. G. Fowler, the compilers of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, define ‘boredom’ as ‘being bored; ennui ’ — which only goes to show that there is a point beyond which conciseness ceases to be a virtue. There are, to be sure, words of which little need be said, but for many others which closely concern us as human beings the definitions should be the distilled essence of centuries of experience filtered through the minds of truly wise men. ‘Boredom’ is such a word, and to define it merely as ‘being bored,’ appallingly true though this may be, is only to aggravate the misery of the sufferer who, as a last desperate resource, has gone to the dictionary for enlightenment as to the nature of his complaint.

I do not profess to be even a moderately wise man, but I think I can improve upon this Fowlerian definition. Boredom is a lesser malady of the soul, of yet undiscovered origin, whose effect is to deaden completely, for the time of its duration, one’s interest in life; and its most dismaying symptom is that the victim truly believes, despite all past experience to the contrary, that this numbness of the spirit is never to be relieved.

This is as near as I can come to conciseness that offers at least a dim ray of enlightenment, and, at the same time, a grain of comfort to the bored person.

Someone may say that my definition does not cover his case. He may insist that he suffers acutely from his attacks of boredom. If this is true, then I can assure him that, whatever his affliction may be, it is not boredom. It would be impossible to suffer acutely from boredom — we have here a contradiction in terms. True boredom causes a dull, grayish-hued misery that has nothing of pain’s positive, colorful, capricious, anguished surprises. There are none of these in store for the genuinely bored person. He is like a man in a room with hermetically sealed windows, breathing air that has been used over and over again. One doomed to listen endlessly to the unctuous, buttery voice of a radio announcer would know something of the same quality of hopeless despair.

Anatole France called it a disease of well-born souls. Such a statement springs from pure snobbishness. Surely Anatole France must have known that the whole of organic creation suffers from the ravages of boredom, and that the well-born suffer least, for they, usually, are articulate in wretched as well as in happy states of consciousness. My sympathy goes out to those who can find no such relief; for whom boredom is wretchedness without a voice.

II

There is an old French saying that appears, on the surface, to offer hope to persons in a bored state: Il faut savoir s’ennuyer. I have pondered this saying, turning it this way and that in my mind in an attempt to read out of it some occult meaning, and always with out success. One must know how to be bored — if this is anything more than sheer nonsense, I have yet to discover what. So far as my experience goes, the only virtue in boredom is to increase enormously one’s joy in life when, as unaccountably as it came, the disease leaves one. There is no convalescent period; the victim is cured at once, leaping from misery to perfect health in one vigorous joyous bound.

It seems strange to me that the pathology of boredom has not attracted more serious attention on the part of our spiritual diagnosticians and surgeons. It has been left almost entirely to the investigations of laymen, and even the most enlightened of these are often at error in their discussions of the disease. Aldous Huxley, for example, confuses boredom, which is a comparatively trivial complaint, with that most dread of all spiritual diseases, acedia. For this latter there is no cure but death. Few indeed, I hope and believe, are its victims. I have never known one in the flesh, and but two in books — James Thomson, author of The City of Dreadful Night, and Herman Melville. If anyone doubts that Melville was a victim of acedia at its worst, let him reread the latter part of Moby Dick once more. Let him attempt to look into the abyss which Melville saw, and he will have an inkling, at least, of the infinite capacity for despair possible to the human spirit.

I turn with relief from this truly awful malady of the soul to the discussion of our comparatively trivial complaint. There must be a cure for boredom — not a universal panacea, perhaps, but some quite simple remedy that would be effective in many cases. Physical exercise is often recommended. I have tried this, sometimes beneficially, but more often without result. I have sawed and split firewood for hours at a time, and had my labor for my pains, the more so because I live in the tropics. I have climbed mountains, and boredom has climbed with me, enveloping me in a yellowish fog the moment I reached the summit, and descended with me again. I have gone to bed with a weariness of body that would have been most grateful had not boredom denied me all enjoyment in weariness. No, physical exertion is not a certain cure—in my case, at least.

I doubt whether our spiritual maladies can always be traced to some purely physiological cause. I believe that a man may be a perfect organism, every part of his physical machinery functioning splendidly, and still suffer from boredom. Conversely, he may be afflicted with all or most of the ills flesh is subject to and yet be free from this one of the spirit. Its causes, I think, lie deeper than is commonly supposed. It may be that boredom has its part in the rhythm of life; it may be subject, in some measure, to the law of periodicity supposed to control our happier states of consciousness. If this is true, then it is useless to seek a cure. The best we can do is to prepare for our attacks with fortitude — they usually give warning of their approach — and to endure them with resignation.

III

One way of enduring them is to seek companions in misery. Not in the flesh! Heaven forbid! Two bored persons aggravate one another’s wretchedness; but one bored person may find comfort through seeking, in books, the reactions to boredom of those who have suffered in the past. And not only in books: in music, as well. Tschaikowsky’s ‘Troika en Traîneaux,’ for example, is one of the best musical descriptions of boredom I have ever heard, and what a three-horse sleigh has to do with the matter has always puzzled me.

The poets have been splendidly articulate on the subject of boredom — after the event, of course; some of the best minor poems in the language have been inspired by ennui. A curious fact is that they have been written largely by the lesser hierarchy of poets. One might think that the greater souls, the stronger singers, are almost never attacked. My belief is that they suffer often enough, but refuse to admit it even to themselves. They refuse to accept boredom as a malady that can touch them, and so, instead of maintaining a patient silence during their attacks, they insist upon writing as though nothing were amiss with them. One has only to run through the collected works of any of the major poets to see how often they tried to delude themselves.

The most notable poem in English descriptive of the happy state following an attack of boredom is, of course, Milton’s ‘L’Allegro.’ To be sure, he speaks of ‘ loathèd Melancholy,’ but when he goes on to tell us of her parentage and where she was born, we know at once that he means thrice-loathèd Boredom. Melancholy has a fair and seemly twilight home, and she herself is a gentle, mild-eyed, by no means unwelcome spirit. Milton would never have said ‘Hence!’ to her. And consider the tempo at which he proceeds : —

No English poet has surpassed, or even approached, Tennyson in extracting from boredom its volatile essences; for they are volatile, or can be made so by a great artist seeking them in the chemistry of suffering souls; and as they evaporate they give off enchanting odors. Of all poems dealing directly or indirectly with the disease of boredom, ‘Mariana’ is my favorite. Never has its effect been described more magically, with greater insight, than here, particularly in the stanza: —

IV

That hour, of a truth, is the one most to be loathed and dreaded. The 2.30 to 3.30 P.M. aspect of boredom, on a day of bright sunshine, makes the morning and evening aspects seem cheerful by comparison. A strange perverseness seizes bored persons toward the middle of a cloudless afternoon, causing them to seek, not relief, but, if possible, increased misery. At any rate, I have found this true in my own case. I seem to be under some malign influence that leads me to the dreariest of all possible places at this worst of all possible hours.

Formerly it was my custom to seek out one of those dingy nondescript business streets to be found in any American town or city, where, in the middle of the block, there is certain to be an even dingier, utterly forlorn dairy lunchroom. Into this place I would go, toward three o’clock in the afternoon, huddle into one of its chairs (with a broad arm for dishes), near the flyspecked window, and gaze — for an eternity, it seemed — into a fingermarked mug filled with lukewarm, chocolate-colored coffee. Every man knows that pleasure, if it be keen enough, is scarcely to be distinguished from pain. It is equally true that wretchedness piled upon wretchedness, layer after layer, squeezes out of the poor victim, beneath, a thin trickle of pleasurable emotion. I don’t know why this should be, but so it is. If one can be wretched enough, one can, in a sense, find pleasure in wretchedness. I believe that . . .

May I leave this sentence hanging in the air? It does n’t in the least matter what I was about to say. A glorious thing has happened: boredom has left me, as mysteriously as it came. I will confess, now, that this dissertation was begun in a desperate attempt—the first I have ever made — to find a vent for the misery of the bored state; therefore I sat down at my table, and, without having the least notion of what I should write, I began writing, and continued to the words ‘ I believe that . . .’ Here I paused, my attention having been attracted by a leaf shadow on the corner of the table nearest the window. Of a sudden I realized that it was surpassingly beautiful, and wondered how I could have failed to notice it before. In that instant I was cured. How is this to be explained? I have not even time to stop for a reply.