St. Ennui

If psychologists have studied boredom in any serious way, I don’t know about it. It does seems to be part and parcel of our modern condition, and Pascal recognized as much as early as the 17th century. Walker Percy tells us that much before that time the word boredom didn’t exist. Perhaps because the self didn’t exist in the same self-obsessive and isolationist manner it does today. And yet by the 17th century Pascal is modern enough to describe the life of man as anxious, bored and inconstant. Or something to that effect.

Walker Percy speculates that “boring” is derived from the verb, “to bore.” But what is being bored through by boredom?

The self, of course. Boredom, therefore, is an act of extraordinary violence to the soul. Which is why much of our lives is an attempt to divert ourselves from ourselves, to get “caught in the moment,” the “flow,” or what have you. To gain our souls by losing ourselves. It seems we were made such that the self can’t stand to look at itself and will do virtually anything whatsoever to avoid the sight—all the while obsessing on itself, a prisoner of itself. ‘Tisn’t easy being a self.

I recall as a little boy going shopping with my mother at Metcalf Mall in Overland Park, Kansas. Sometimes she’d get her hair done at a salon, the kind of open room with the hard plastic scooped chairs and rows and rows of beehive dryers. The place was thick with the unholy and unnatural odors of chemicals unfit for humans yet sprayed around the head. The hair cutters wore smocks and the place was bright with light amplified by mirrors that reflected wet female heads and echoes of the same sharp whiteness. It was all porcelain, tile, and sterile as a forensics lab. On the small smudgy glass tables where the clients (and their sons) waited there were stacks and stacks of hair magazines in which women posed, elbows akimbo, staring into the middle distance at some unseen other. The countenances of the women were all the same—women who knew were they being gazed upon but who clearly had no need for any human relationship whatsoever. Their eyes were looking at nothing in particular and had no purpose, it seemed, apart from conveying with their icy coldness this warning to others: I’m self-sufficient and in need of nothing, thank you, and especially not you--so when you’re done looking at me, creep, please take your leave. The hairdryers roared like jet planes, and above it all I could hear the cackling of women whose laughs were far from invitations to join in the fun.

And there I sat on the hard plastic chair waiting, alone. And at that moment I remember a kind of generalized pain to my body akin to suffocation. I felt trapped and fought urges to bolt. (It was good training for making it through committee meetings.)


I was bored. My self, my soul was being bored through and hollowed out. Emptied of content and disordered.

Boredom kills the self by bringing it into itself without diversion. Which, of course, is what hell must be like. A state of just me, myself, and I. And that should be torment quite enough. In such a state, a visit from the devil himself would be most welcome.