Travels with Epicurus by Daniel Klein Read Free Book Online

camping out in the woods seems more like an ordeal than recreation. And added to this is the fact that inevitably—the gatherings on Dimitri’s terrace notwithstanding—an old man finds himself alone more often than ever before in his life. Lots of time, nothing to do. The blankness of boredom.
    Another book I packed for this trip was
A Philosophy of Boredom
, by the Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, and it was well worth the space it took up in my baggage. It is that rare book of contemporary philosophy that combines keen scholarship with a sympathetic concern for the stuff we ordinary humans worry about.
    Svendsen points out that boredom is a relatively new idea that arose out of late-eighteenth-century romanticism and its emphasis on the primacy of the individual. Instead of contentedly accepting their role in society and its traditions, people were urged by the romantic ideal to create their individual identity and, along with that, their own meaning of life. The drawback, writes Svendsen, is that “a society that functions well promotes man’s ability to find meaning in the world; one that functions badly does not. In premodern societies there is usually a collective meaning that is sufficient. For us ‘Romantics,’ things are more problematic.” Meaning does not come easily, or even at all, to many of us, especially to those of us who have lost a secure connection to a traditional God and religion.
    In “existential boredom,” as compared to “situational boredom” (for example, the feeling that overcomes me while sitting for two hours in the waiting room of my urologist), a person is locked inside a self that cannot find meaning in anything at all, a self that often has given up even trying to find meaning in anything. It is that feeling of pervasive emptiness best captured by the French word
ennui
, a word that gained popularity in English via Cole Porter’s song “I Get a Kick Out of You”:
    But practically everything leaves me totally cold.
    The only exception I know is the case
    Where I’m out on a quiet spree
    Fighting vainly the old ennui. . . .
    With nothing meaningful in life, nothing is interesting. ­Enter boredom. A bored man even longs for longing. He has time to fill, but there is nothing compelling to do. He is bored to death. Those of us prone to melancholy are all too familiar with the feeling of existential boredom.
    So, according to Svendsen, in order to fill his time, modern man got busy cooking up personal goals, seeking out challenging activities, and, most significantly, looking for
newness
. New experiences and new things couldn’t possibly be boring, could they? Well, apparently they often could. After finally getting to be vice president of the company, another goal looms just ahead—becoming senior vice president, then president, then president of a larger company, and then of an even larger one. It can feel endless and never completely satisfying, and at a certain point it can start to feel pointless. Newness itself gets old. At the twelfth place to see before dying, viewing exotic terrain can get to be old hat—you’ve already done “exotic” eleven times. Old people are often particularly conscious of the half-life of newness. The phrases “the more things change, the more they remain the same” and “nothing would surprise me at this point in my life” come easily to our lips.
    If a man cannot invest his life, or any part of it, with meaning, all he has left are distractions from meaninglessness, although few of us acknowledge them as such. But here and there we probably have intimations that these distractions are meaningless themselves. Svendsen writes, “The most hyperactive of us are precisely those who have the lowest boredom thresholds. We have an almost complete lack of downtime, scurrying from one activity to the next because we cannot face tackling time