Boredom Read Free

assume forms that were entirely obscure both to myself and to other people, forms which I was unable to explain and which others, not infrequently my mother, attributed to upsets in my health or other similar causes—just as the crossness of infants is often attributed to their cutting teeth. During those years, I would suddenly stop playing and remain motionless for hours on end, as though in astonishment, in reality overcome by the uneasiness inspired in me by what I have called the withering of objects; the obscure consciousness that between myself and external things there was no relationship. If at such times my mother came into the room, and seeing me dumb and inert and pale with distress, asked what was wrong with me, I answered invariably: “I’m bored,” thus explaining a vague and indefinite state of mind in a single word of clear, narrow significance. My mother, taking my statement seriously, would lean down and kiss me and then promise to take me to the motion pictures that afternoon, or suggest some kind of amusement which I knew perfectly well was neither the opposite thing to boredom nor yet its remedy. And I, though pretending to welcome her suggestion with delight, could not prevent myself from having the same feeling of boredom—the boredom that my mother claimed to be driving away—at the touch of her lips on my forehead, at the placing of her arms round my shoulders, as well as at the thought of the pictures that she held like a dazzling mirage in front of my eyes. Neither with her lips, nor with her arms, nor yet with the pictures had I any sort of relationship at that moment. But how could I explain to my mother that the feeling of boredom from which I was suffering could not be alleviated in any way? I have already observed that boredom consists chiefly of incommunicability. And now, being unable to communicate with my mother, from whom I was cut off as I was from every other kind of external object, I was in a way forced to accept the misunderstanding and lie to her.
    I will pass quickly over the disasters caused by my boredom during adolescence. At that period it was my worst trial at school and was attributed to so-called “weaknesses,” in other words to a congenital incapacity in one subject or another, and I myself accepted this explanation for lack of any more valid one. I now know for certain, however, that the bad marks which fell upon me thick and fast at the end of each scholastic year were due to one cause only—boredom. Indeed I felt acutely, with my customary deep distress, that I had no relationship whatever with all that enormous jumble of Athenian kings and Roman emperors, of South American rivers and mountains in Asia, of Dante’s hendecasyllables and Virgil’s hexameters, of algebraical processes and chemical formulae. All these unending pieces of information did not concern me, or concerned me only in order that I might establish the fact of their fundamental absurdity. But I did not boast, either to myself or to others, about this purely negative feeling that I experienced, in fact I told myself that I ought not to experience it, and I suffered from it. I remember that this suffering, even then, inspired in me a desire both to define and to explain it. But I was a mere boy, with all the pedantry and ambition of a boy. The result, therefore, was a project for a universal history “according to boredom,” of which, however, I wrote only the first few pages. My universal history according to boredom was based on a very simple idea: the mainspring of it was neither progress, nor biological evolution, nor economic development, nor any of the other ideas usually brought forward by historians of various schools; it was simply boredom. Burning with enthusiasm at this magnificent discovery, I went right to the root of the matter. In the beginning was boredom, commonly called chaos. God, bored with boredom, created the earth, the sky, the waters, the animals, the plants, Adam and