Boredom Read Free Page A

Eve; and the latter, bored in their turn in paradise, ate the forbidden fruit. God became bored with them and drove them out of Eden; Cain, bored with Abel, killed him; Noah, bored to tears, invented wine; God, once again bored with mankind, destroyed the world by means of the Flood; but this in turn bored Him to such an extent that He brought back fine weather again. And so on. The great empires—Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman—rose out of boredom and fell again in boredom; the boredom of paganism gave rise to Christianity; that of Catholicism, to Protestantism; the boredom of Europe caused the discovery of America; the boredom of feudalism kindled the French Revolution; and that of capitalism, the revolution in Russia. All these fine discoveries were noted down by me in a kind of summary, then I began with great enthusiasm to write the true and proper history. I do not remember exactly, but I don’t think I went any further than a highly detailed description of the atrocious boredom from which Adam and Eve suffered in the Garden of Eden, and how, precisely because of this boredom, they committed their mortal sin. Then I grew bored with the whole project and abandoned it.
    Actually I suffered from boredom between the ages of ten and twenty to a perhaps greater extent than in any other period of my life. I was born in 1920; thus the time of my adolescence was spent beneath the black banner of Fascism, that is, of a political regime which had been erected into a system by the incommunicability both of the dictator toward the masses and of the individual citizens between each other and toward the dictator. Boredom, which is the lack of a relationship with external things, was in the very air one breathed during the period of Fascism, and to this social boredom must be added the boredom of dull sexual urgency which, as is liable to happen at that age, prevented me from making contact with the very women who I believed could afford me relief. But my boredom saved me from the civil war which was to devastate Italy for two years. This was how it happened. I was in the army, in a division stationed in Rome, and as soon as the armistice was declared I took off my uniform and went home. Then a proclamation was made bidding all soldiers rejoin their units on pain of death. My mother, characteristically obsequious to the authorities, who at that moment were Fascist and German, advised me to put on my uniform again and report to headquarters. She was anxious for my safety, but in reality she was urging me toward deportation and probably death in a Nazi concentration camp—as happened to many of my comrades in arms. It was boredom, and boredom alone—that is, the impossibility of establishing contact of any kind between myself and the proclamation, between myself and my uniform, between myself and the Fascists—it was boredom from which I had suffered for twenty years, and which now caused the great empire of the fasces and the swastika to be entirely non-existent in my eyes, which saved me. Despite my mother’s prayers, I took refuge in the country, in the villa of a friend, and there I spent the whole period of the civil war, painting—which is as good a way of passing the time as any other. It was then that I became a painter; that is, I hoped to be able to re-establish contact with reality, once and for all, by means of artistic expression. In the first sense of relief brought about by my enthusiasm for painting, I did indeed almost convince myself that my boredom had been nothing more than the boredom of an artist ignorant of his vocation. I was wrong, but for some time I deluded myself with the idea that I had found a remedy.
    At the end of the war I went back to live with my mother who, in the meantime, had acquired a big villa on the Via Appia. I had hoped, as I said, that painting had overcome boredom once and for all, but I realized almost at once that this was not so. I started suffering from boredom