Boredom

Sir Walter Scott in his Journal wrote, "Few men, leading a quiet life, and without any strong or highly varied change of circumstances, have seen more variety of society than I—few have enjoyed it more, or been bored, as it is called, less by the company of tiresome people." Could it be this is why Scott can spend so much time writing about details which often bore other people? Even I, a fairly devoted Scott reader, can find him a bore at times -- though an entertaining bore.

It is this word "bore" which interests me most. The emphasis on "bored" is Scott's. Scott probably italicised it because it was still a novel word, and therefore still retained its old definition of making a hole through something. I suspect the new definition -- as in something which is tiresome -- corresponds to the tedium of the industrial age, a tedium not caused by an absence of something but rather something boring, i.e drilling into you so severely as to create a hole into which is filled tedium. Is boredom then a modern phenomenon, particularly to an urban age, and perhaps even an agricultural age? Am I a terrible Rousseauian optimist for wondering whether boredom is in fact possible in a state of nature?

Certainly it seems more possible in a highly developed society with bureaucracies, earpiece-wearing businessmen, impersonal large-scale retail, background music, smartphones and social media -- contrary to conventional wisdom, I think smartphones, instead to eliminating boredom, in fact create more boredom: it is the bored person who idly sits there on his phone; he would be a lot less bored were he to do something like go for a walk; instead he scrolls and scrolls and scrolls, his boredom only occasionally alleviated by the sight of something novel, and then he scrolls some more trying to find another relief.

For my own part, I can only recall experiencing boredom when it has been imposed on me. I think of retail work, or when I would be stuck in a seminar with dull unthinking peers, or the dreadful slowness of a school detention. I'm never bored at home. There is always a book on the shelf, and if I've run out of new books, good: I enjoy re-reading even more. There is always an instrument to play, paper (or, admittedly, a computer) to write on, thoughts to entertain. There are always places to walk -- a woods nearby, with my favourite rodent, the squirrel. Like Scott, "I cannot remember the time when I had not some ideal part to play for my own solitary amusement."