The Boredom/Bliss Continuum

Slow accretion of ice on a window in winter

Note: The following post is pulled from the Slow Muse archives. What caught me on the reread was the note left by David Foster Wallace with his final manuscript: “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

This is a provocative thought, but I’m not sure I understand what he is saying or that I agree. I am one of those who avoid the tedious with such tenacity, inventing different routes home and shifting my patterns constantly just so it doesn’t seem rote. Riding this out as he suggests is hard for me to fathom, but perhaps you will see it differently.
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An essay in the Times Book Review by Jennifer Schuessler has a provocative topic: Boredom.

Ah, that dreaded word. Full of moral implications. Antithetical to everything I learned (and probably inherited through epigenetics) from my pioneer heritage. You never left yourself get bored, and you never admit if for some reason you do. NEVER.

As Schuessler points out, “As a general state of mind, boredom is morally suspect, threatening to shine its dull light back on the person who invokes it. ‘The only horrible thing in the world is ­ennui,’ Oscar Wilde once wrote, suggesting that boredom doesn’t feel much better in French. ‘That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.'”

In fact, says Schuessler, boredom has some benefits. Brain research suggests that when we are awake but not doing anything in particular, our central processors are churning along, particularly in those parts responsible for memory, empathy with others and imagining hypothetical events—in other words, many of the skills needed for a successful literary experience. Hmmm. Something to consider.

Schuessler makes the discussion lively:

It’s common to decry our collective thaasophobia, or fear of boredom, manifested in our addiction to iPhone apps, the cable news crawl and ever mutating varieties of multitasking. One cellphone company has even promoted the idea of ­“microboredom,” which refers to those moments of inactivity that occur when we’re, say, stuck waiting in line for a latte without our BlackBerry. But novelists, for all their own fears of being dismissed as boring, continue to offer some bold resistance to the broader culture’s zero-tolerance boredom eradication program.

Bringing the discussion around to books, Schuessler highlights the posthumous publication of David Foster Wallace‘s unfinished manuscript, The Pale King:

“The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s novel, found unfinished after his suicide in 2008, is about the inner lives of number-crunching I.R.S. agents. An excerpt that appeared last year in The New Yorker depicts a universe of microboredom gone macro…For all the mundanity of its subject matter, the excerpt presents boredom as something more strenuous and exalted than the friendly helper depicted by the neuroscientists, keeping our minds revved up even when we think we’re idling. Boredom isn’t just good for your brain. It’s good for your soul. “Bliss—a second-by-­second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom,” Wallace wrote in a note left with the manuscript. “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”