Our Boredom, Ourselves

By Jennifer Schuessler

● Jan. 21, 2010

If you read a lot of book reviews, there are certain words that tend to crop up with
comforting, or maybe it’s dismaying regularity. Lyrical. Compelling. Moving.
Intriguing. Absorbing. Frustrating. Uneven. Disappointing. But there is one word
you seldom encounter: boring. It occurred a mere 19 times in the Book Review in
2009, and rarely as a direct description of the book under review.

This isn’t because books sent out to reviewers never turn out to be boring. (Trust me
on this one.) Rather, boredom — unlike its equally bland smiley-faced twin, interest
— is something professional readers, who are expected to keep things lively, would
rather not admit to, for fear of being scolded and sent back to the Weekly Reader. 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.”

And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and
write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of
active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove
interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the
irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic
repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book,
especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of
information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also
probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.

Boredom, like the modern novel, was born in the 18th century, and came into full
flower in the 19th. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded use of “to bore”
dates to a 1768 letter by the Earl of Carlisle, mentioning his “Newmarket friends, who
are to be bored by these Frenchmen.” “Bores,” meaning boring things, arrived soon
after, followed by human bores. By the time of the O.E.D.’s first citation of the noun
“boredom” in 1852, in Dickens’s “Bleak House” (where it occurs six times by my
count), everyone, or at least everyone in the novel-reading middle classes, seemed to
be bored, or worried about becoming bored.
Boredom, scholars argue, was something new, different from the dullness, lassitude
and tedium people had no doubt been experiencing for centuries. In her ingenious
study “Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind” (1995), Patricia Meyer
Spacks describes it as a luxury — and a peril — born of the Industrial Revolution,
reflecting the rise of individualism, leisure (especially female leisure) and the idea of
happiness as a right and a daunting personal responsibility. “Boredom presents itself
as a trivial emotion that can trivialize the world,” Spacks writes. “It implies an
embracing sense of irritation and unease. It reflects a state of affairs in which the
individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power.”

Image
Credit...

Illustration by Paul Sahre and Jonas Beuchert

In Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift,” the narrator — a writer who spends the “final
Eisenhower years” trying to write the definitive treatise on boredom — describes it as
“a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, .
. . accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities.” But
boredom may itself be a highly useful human capacity, at least according to some
psychologists and neuroscientists, who have begun examining it not just as an
accomplice to depression and addiction but as an important source of creativity,
well-being and our very sense of self.

Researchers have discovered that when people are conscious but doing nothing — for
example, lying in an f.M.R.I. scanner, waiting to be given some simple mental task as
part of a psychology experiment — the brain is in fact firing away, with greater
activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, imagining the
thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events: the literary areas
of the brain, you might say. When this so-called default mode network is activated,
the brain uses only about 5 percent less energy than it does when engaged in basic
tasks. But that discrepancy may explain why time seems to pass more slowly at such
moments. It may also explain the agitated restlessness that compels the bored to seek
relief in doodling or daydreaming.

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.
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In April 2011, the limits of literary boredom will be tested when Little, Brown &
Company publishes “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s novel, found unfinished
after his suicide in 2008, 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: “He did another return; again the math squared and
there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and
Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle
tray’s 402 and signed his name and ID number. . . .”

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.”

It remains to be seen whether “The Pale King” will break through to the ecstasy
beyond boredom, or just put readers to sleep. (Or perhaps cause serial brain injury,
like the unreadably dense experimental novel that keeps laying waste to readers in
“The Information,” by Martin Amis.) But if Wallace’s last work turns out to be
unbearably dull, perhaps we should be grateful. After all, if it weren’t for all the
boring books in the world, why would anyone feel the need to try to write more
­interesting ones?
Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at the Book Review.

A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 24, 2010, Page 23 of the Sunday
Book Review with the headline: Our Boredom, Ourselves. Order Reprints | Today’s
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