'Roundabout
Boredom
By KATHARINE WH1TEHORN
WAITING ROOM, GARE DE LYONS
ENGLISH students of French classical tragedy are apt to take the edge off their sufferings by translating the word ennui in its literal twen- tieth-century meaning of 'boredom.' To Corneille and Racine, of course, it simply meant trouble, and part of a work- ing trio with rage and desespoir; but that's the twentieth century all over : it has not only to a great extent replaced tragedy with tedium, but ensures that even tragedy will be surrounded h}e tedium. Boredom is of eight types. I. Ordinary boredom—the simple dreariness ur the actual task on hand—dish-washing, proof- correcting, reading Noddy aloud. This, in which the task is inescapable and genuinely mono- tonous, is not to be confused with 2. Alailana boredom : in which the minutes "I. even days pass in absorbed attention to °IelY uninteresting things simply as a form Procrastination. This is the situation in which 'nen without gardens pore over seed advertise- eats and quite sensible people start reading last rh°11th's Radio Times; the situation in which wastes time doing washing up which the 'hal' would do anyway rather than get on with article. Not to be confused with 3. Contemplative boredom—the state in which inhe°Ple deliberately bore themselves with little it,gs as a way of relaxing, of reducing life to 1.4 enclosed circle, where blood-pressure and nk-rate and thought slow down, almost to a srtandstill. This is the calculated boredom of ishing, or watching a fish swim round a tank. e 4.1Ioredom in vacuo is possibly the common- , 1,3ct, kind. This is the boredom of the waiting '4)111 at Crewe, of the traffic block, of the 'queue. of being bored only because you are :Lit* cut off from interesting things, as one 'all out of the house by forgetting one's key. tr S. Boredom in depth is the worst. In its ex- form this is the situation in which you .',,_1111:31Y wake up in the wrong job or the wrong intarda.s e or the wrong life; in its minor form 's the boredom of captivity, of boarding ceilh'°°Is and prisoner-of-war camps. Its essential Ific,racteristic is that, even when things arc super- ., ,41111, interesting, the yawn remains. 1,fivt) The boredom of inevitability. The previous ,th„e tYPes of boredom depend, if one looks into 1111;111, on a gap between expectation and fact : .qttd. keval peasants were not particularly bored, ho:lig there by the rushlight; animals are not in spite of a lack of good reading matter. 41,,IS sixth type of boredom, him ever, exists i 017st solely on expectation it is not what bu,1 Is doing at the moment that is excruciating, ._0 the certain knowledge that it will go on for '411 ther hour and a quarter. This is the boredom of the MI; of family jokes brought out and dusted every Christmas with the decorations for the tree; of Presbyterian sermons and of plays labelled 'A Comedy Thriller.'
There are also two other categories which, though not boredom in its truest sense, cannot well be ignored. One is fake boredom. This is the reaction of all of us to elaborate conversa- tion on a subject about which we know nothing: medi...al or shop, theatrical workshop, missile medleys or scurrilous gossip about people we don't know. However trivial, we wish deep down we did understand.
And the final category is not boredom itself but the smell of boredom: the inescapable whiff that rises from certain phrases and suggestions to give us warning. I do not mean merely direct threats like 'He will play a small piece of his own composition' or 'Let me show, you my colour slides.' Boredom arises just as un- mistakably from those pairs of words in which the adjective drags down an already not very thrilling noun, such as Empire Westerns, Tinned Prunes, Temporary Lecture Hall, Reader's Digest Condensed Book.
Analysing boredom is easy; combating it despairingly difficult. For types 3, 7 and 8 no palliative is necessary; for the other types there are only three possibilities. You can lessen the gap between fact and expectation by stepping up the fact—you can change the job, junk the spouse, climb in through the window of the house you are locked out of. This is fine, when you can do it; but usually you can't. You can alter the expectation by convincing yourself you ought to be doing something else—and where this is appropriate it works like a charm. Working housewives get the washing-up done only by making it a guilty retreat from brainwork already overdue; writers get on with their writing only by using the typewriter as a substitute for the lawn- mower. (It is the absence of something else they ought to be doing that makes the boredom of the Sagan set so inescapable.) And finally, you can reduce the expectation before you even arrive at the situation where boredom is likely to occur. A good deal of boredom can be forestalled by taking along enough to do. Take, for example, the two com- monly infuriating situations where the boat fails to get off the mudbank and an aeroplane fails to get off the ground. Keen sailors who leap up and down in a lather of frustration trying to get off the mudbank have a much worse time than those who simply say 'It is the will of Allah' and settle back with a book; and those who take letters to write during the long slow waits on journeys have a pleasant feeling that the worse the delays are the more work they get done. You can even, with practice, learn to read a magazine on the silly little bus that takes you out to the plane and, of course, back again twenty minutes later.
But there are, admittedly, occasions when reading or writing is impossible. And then there is only one line of defence left: to retire, like Aunt Sadie in The Pursuit of Love, into a cloud of boredom and stay there. You can make lists of all the towns you have ever visited, of the number of authors of whose works you have read more than three, the number of beds you have slept in since you were born, the number of people who have been in love with you (let us hope they are different lists).
You can even, when all else fails, make lists of the different types of boredom.
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