Category Archives: Quotes

On Repeat

And the phrase that goes through my head again and again…

“Eichmann spent the last months of the war cooling his heels in Berlin with nothing to do…”

How I feel again and again…

The Mundane

I haven’t read much Chekov, but he certainly did make my reading list.

The notion that it is boredom that wears on us day, day in, day out: there is a kind of endurance that modern life requires, this interests me. It does, in a way, make us robot-like, starting work everyday at the same time, coming home, recharging after work with the things that make us feel like us again, our “happy place.” Going to bed at a certain hour. It is easy to become overwhelmed with the repetitious nature of it all, which is why the above quote is so appropriate.

On the topic, on boredom, which is a perfectly natural response to the everyday- seeming-like-every-other-day, David Foster Wallace (famed postmodern author of Infinite Jest) wrote a book called the Pale King, about an IRS agent and about the experience of boredom in our modern advanced capitalist society (which is not necessarily a critique of capitalism, more an exploration of the experience of living day-to-day). It’s been a while since I’ve read the book. But below is possibly my favorite passage:

His idea is to produce and perform a play that is about a tax examiner doing his job at a desk on a stage in front of people in real-time, until the very boredom of the scene wears them down and bothers them enough that they complain and leave. Very little dialogue, one character, no action. It’s just a play about boredom, which, on his view (the main character’s view), is very realistic, and true to his life as a tax examiner and much of life in general.

This is not to say I think all life is or has to be boring, but I think it has a lesson for us: life will involve some amount of it, as much as we might dislike it, and we can run from it, avoid it, distract ourselves from it, but it is still there: a natural byproduct of the way in which our society is structured. But also, we can find interesting things in the boring. The German word sitzfleisch is all about this: having the wherewithal to sit and power through the tough and the sometimes-boring to get to the good stuff, to learn about, do or accomplish something.

Still, maybe the boring tells us that something is not of-interest to us, does not have to do with our sense of our identity, or exploring some aspect of it, and is a marker telling us to explore elsewhere for signs of interest. That idea, I will have to explore more in another post.

But, and this is a big but, even if there is boredom in the world, we have each other, and in-between the boredom, we have the excitement of friendship (close or occasional friendship), love (even though real, true love, I think, also involves some occasional, endurable boredom) and music and books and tv and adventuring-trips. “Life must be lived forwards” as Kierkegaard said.

So, life can be boring sometimes, but we can also make it interesting if we try, and doing it with another or others, is a way to make it all the more memorable and fun.