People with experience maintain that proceeding from a basic principle is supposed to be
very reasonable; I yield to them and proceed from the basic principle that all people are
boring. Or is there anyone who would be boring enough to contradict me in this regard?
This basic principle has to the highest degree the repelling force always required in the
negative, which is actually the principle of motion. It is not merely repelling but infinitely
repulsive, and whoever has the basic principle behind him must necessarily have infinite
momentum for making discoveries. If, then, my thesis is true, a person needs only to
ponder how corrupting boredom is for people, tempering his reflections more or less
according to his desire to diminish or increase his impetus, and if he wants to press the
speed of the motion to the highest point, almost with danger to the locomotive, he needs
only to say to himself: Boredom is the root of all evil. It is very curious that boredom,
which itself has such a calm and sedate nature, can have such a capacity to initiate
motion. The effect that boredom brings about is absolutely magical, but this effect is one
not of attraction but of repulsion.
Function of boredom. Good + bad
[Arthur] Schopenhauer the first imp[ortant] writer to talk about boredom (in his Essays) — ranks it with “pain” as one of the twin evils of life (pain for have-nots, boredom for haves— it’s a question of affluence).
People say “it’s boring” — as if that were a final standard of appeal, and no work of art had the right to bore us.
But most of the interesting art of our time is boring. Jasper Johns is boring. Beckett is boring, Robbe-Grillet is boring. Etc. Etc.
Maybe art has to be boring, now. (Which obviously doesn’t mean that boring art is necessarily good — obviously.)
We should not expect art to entertain or divert any more. At least, not high art.
Boredom is a function of attention. We are learning new modes of attention — say, favoring the ear more than the eye— but so long as we work within the old attention-frame we find X boring … e.g. listening for sense rather than sound (being too message-oriented). Possibly after repetition of the same single phrase or level of language or image for a long while — in a given written text or piece of music or film, if we become bored, we should ask if we are operating in the right frame of attention. Or — maybe we are operating in one right frame, where we should be operating in two simultaneously, thus halving the load on each (as sense and sound).
What is the purpose of boredom? Why is it such a universal emotion? — CuddlyHedgehog
What is the purpose of boredom? Why is it such a universal emotion? — CuddlyHedgehog
What is the purpose of boredom? Why is it such a universal emotion? — CuddlyHedgehog
What is the purpose of boredom? Why is it such a universal emotion? — CuddlyHedgehog
Boredom happens — Bitter Crank
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