Boredom, a kind of living death
“Dear World, I am leaving because I am bored.”
So began the note actor George Sanders left behind when he committed suicide in 1972.
It is, one might say, perfectly phrased. Notice that Sanders didn’t complain about anything being boring, only that he was bored. So he was being serious. Boredom inheres in the person who is bored, not in others or things or circumstances. It is not boring You are bored.
That is why, if you’re bored, changing you circumstances won’t help. You’ve got to change yourself. As Socrates said, when told of a man who had traveled the known world and learned nothing: “That’s because he took only himself along.”
I am not prone to boredom. There’s almost always something interesting going on, if you take the time and trouble to look for it (actually, it takes little time and is usually no trouble).
The most boring circumstances I have ever found myself in were when I was stuck in a bed in an emergency care unit after I had minor surgery and hit the complications jackpot. Morphine notwithstanding, turning over was quite uncomfortable. I couldn’t eat, or read, or write. I just had to lie there and wait for them to fix me up.
What was interesting about it was its complete novelty. I have been blessed with a sound constitution and even in my years of excess took pretty good care of myself. I never had chicken pox or measles or mumps. I don’t think I’ve ever had the flu. So, lying there in that hospital bed, I was in virgin psychological territory.
Naturally, I quickly realized how lucky I had been never to have been seriously ill. I also came to appreciate, as I confess I never had before, how very difficult it must be for persons who are chronically ill.
But the most interesting thing I discovered during my hospital stay took place when I was told I must get up out of bed and take a stroll — with, of course, the help of a walker. I have long believed that exertion generates energy. If you don’t feel like doing anything, do something just for the hell of it. Rest assured, the pistons will start firing. But it seemed I had got used to lying in a hospital bed and doing nothing. Moving would be uncomfortable, and using a walker embarrassing.
Luckily for me the nurse was insistent. Muscles weaken if not used. I had not been using mine. They were getting weaker. I found she was right as I made my way feebly about the unit. I also realized that I had been slipping into a dangerously passive attitude and made sure to be on guard against that from then on.
Had I not, I suspect I would have soon grown indifferent to all around me. I would have become bored. And Sanders was right: That’s as good a reason as any to kill yourself. In fact, it is a kind of living death, spiritual entropy, a long, slow descent to inertia.
We have a natural tendency, it seems, to view things passively. Entire theories of knowledge have been based on the assumption that we are passive receptors of external stimuli. One of the interesting things about Thomas Aquinas — certainly one of the reasons James Joyce was so taken with him (Joyce read a page of the Summa in Latin every day ) — is that his theory of knowledge, in so far as he may be said to have had one, is active, not passive.
For Aquinas, the intellect is an active faculty that grasps the form of what is known and makes it a part of the knower. In other words, knowledge enriches the very being of its possessor. So Leopold Bloom, strolling about Dublin, observing this and that, muttering to himself about all of it, is continuously enriching his soul. By the end of June 16, 1904, he has become more of a person than he was at the beginning.
Mr. Bloom engages the world. He steps out to meet and greet it, pays attention to it, savors it. It is impossible to think of him ever being bored. Or of ever thinking to kill himself.
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The irony is that Bloom (like the rest of us) strolls about and often encounters the mundane (which is often boring) but finds much to be curious about within the mundane. If we fall into the trap of believing in nothing, then everything is boring and we become doomed to a rather dismal existential choice (like Sanders), but believing in something (as Joyce did in spite of himself) has its own rewards because even the mundane encounters yield discoveries (about the self if not about the other).
Splendid one, Frank. Your column reminded me of a wise saying I cannot remember who sayed :); but, it goes: “A bored person is a boring person.”
You, My Friend, do not fit that category aTall to a Tease.
Jf/ox
p.s. Returning next Monday . . .
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