VARIETIES OF BOREDOM
And Moravia's 'Boredom'
Dino, the narrator of Alberto Moravia’s 1960 novel Boredom, is a 35-year-old painter who at the novel’s start tears up a canvas he’s been at work on for months. A chronic case of boredom has brought him to a state of “complete impotence,” artistically and otherwise. He goes on to differentiate his own conception of boredom from the common feeling that’s “the opposite of amusement.” Since boyhood his boredom “consists in a kind of insufficiency, or inadequacy, or lack of reality.” He compares it to a blanket that’s too short on a cold night, a flickering electric current, or a withering process “as though one saw a flower change in a few seconds from a bud to decay and dust.” He fails to form personal relationships with inanimate objects: a cup seems absurd to him, as do the lessons he learns at school. He comes up with a theory of history according to boredom:
My universal history according to boredom was based on a very simple idea: the mainspring of it was neither progress, nor biological 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 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 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.