A couple years ago when I was working on my master’s thesis, every day of writing felt like squeezing blood from a stone. In order to get through the day, I told myself I was allowed to watch one episode of Sex and the City for every page I wrote. There are 94 Sex and the City episodes and I put my thesis to rest in peace at 88 pages (classic writing 88 pages that no one will ever read, love that for me).
I would plow through Angela of Foligno’s divine orgasms and their medieval exegeses so I could watch Miranda eat cake out of a trash can. <3
A scene from an episode that felt especially poetic and moving to me is this one:
I’m so bored I could die.
Then she falls out the window and dies.
It’s so obvious simple, so erotic ironic (eronic), so literary.
Sometimes I get into these periods of long boredom or mental malaise where I’m so put off by all of the information, by the overload of media we’re all inundated with, that I shut down and skim life.
During those periods of boredom, I’m filled with repulsion. I hate reading the news, I hate when people rush to say something relevant, and I hate when people have controversial opinions for the sake of having them. I hate the backlash to the backlash to the thing that's just begun.
I morph into a slightly softer Larry David and begin to have a big opinion on opinions: why does everyone need to have an opinion about everything? Do we now construct our selves and identities based on our opinions? What happens if you don’t have one sometimes: do you start to disappear?
I think when I go through periods like this, of mental malaise or boredom, and sort of repulsion/anger at everything in the media, it means my soul is tired.
I know this because when my soul is nourished, everything is interesting. Even what may seem objectively uninteresting becomes redeemed because I can apply a thought or question to it that makes it interesting. When my soul is dehydrated, I feel so bored I could die. Here’s a definition of the type of boredom I’m talking about, taken from Nuar Alsadir’s essay last week “On Boredom”:
“…the opposite of boredom is not excitement, but calm. Boredom is a restless state of mind, generally marked by dissatisfaction. Just think of how often you feel uninterested in something without being bored. The monotonous car ride from Chicago through Midwest cornfields to the New England college I attended was never boring to me, but a fertile ground for daydreams. When your imagination is free to roam, you can lose yourself in reverie. But when you’re bored, you’re unable to fantasize. You can’t even think.
‘I never quite hear what people say who bore me,’ observes the writer Édouard Levé. What he gets at here is the psychological goal of boredom – tuning things out, although the person boredom tunes out most successfully is oneself. Boredom is a symptom of an unconscious process – an internal muting, which leaves the conscious mind with both a lack and an itch to re-find what is missing.”
Boredom results from being disconnected from yourself. Like the noise inside you is so loud and you ignore it for so long that it turns into a screeching silence, so deafening it drowns out both the external and the internal. Similar to uninspiredness, depression.
Boredom is when nothing moves me.
When I first moved to Italy, the only person who would reply to me in a normally-paced Italian even after hearing my horribly fragmented attempts was my 95 year old neighbor, Sabatino. Sabatino is a perfect name. It means “little sabbath”. I’ve never met anyone with that name since, nor have I heard a name equally sublime.
He wouldn’t merely reply to me in Italian. He would talk at me, and for long periods of time. Even after I told him I didn’t understand what he was saying, he would continue his paragraphs like he was the official street raconteur and I had come to seek entertainment. He would raise his arms passionately, talking and telling. Telling me many things that seemed important and funny.
I found it sort of endearing. I’d see him on the streets of the small town of Orvieto and approach him. It would take physical closeness and a few seconds for him to remember who I was. Then he’d start talking for a while. Once, I understood something he said. It was il Pozzo di San Patrizio. Yes, the famous well in the town! Wait. Was he just giving me a long list of stuff to do in town? Every time I approached him?
I lived in a small studio with an American acquaintance who moved to Italy for love. Sometimes we would leave our apartment door open as we did work to make us feel there were two windows instead of one, and in the mornings, Sabatino would slowly, in his own good time, shuffle down the stairs, making his way somewhere. Then an hour, or sometimes a few hours later, he would slowly shuffle his way up again. Then back down, all throughout the day.
Buongiorno! We said to him in the mornings as he passed our door. And Buonasera! In the afternoons, because Italians refer to the afternoon as evening.
Where is he going? We’d ask each other. Where could he possibly be going? And so slowly? Work? He was in his 90s. It was a miracle to watch him move inch by inch up and down a particularly dangerous marble staircase, and then shuffle down a potentially fatal cobblestone road, all by himself, looking smart with a hat and suspenders, when in a parallel American life he’d been in a rocking chair in a shitty retirement home for the last twenty years.
One day I decided to follow him.
It was an endeavor, and a slow-moving one.
The first ten minutes was him heedfully working his way down the three floors worth of stairs and to the front door. I leaned on the stairwell, waiting for the sound of leaving.
I was in a transition period of life, applying to graduate school, and my days were made up of studying for the GRE, teaching part-time at a small language studio, and taking a lot of walks. And sitting on a lot of benches. And listening to every single new album that came out that year. My roommate had a boyfriend, and I could feel my presence was unwanted during the day because usually when I came home they would whisper and side-eye. So when unoccupied, I would wander.
I met a lot of strange people in my wanderings, and one real friend. She was a real estate agent whose Orvieto roots went back thousands of years. She told me this was common for the townspeople there. Even if you stayed here your whole life, she said to me, And you had kids here, and they had kids here, and then they had kids here—you would still be new. The town of Orvieto is built on a rock called tuffa, so the locals with Etruscan roots referred to themselves as tuffi.
A perk of being a tuffa: she knew all of the local riffraff and the gossip of their lives. I would mention someone by their outfit and she would be able to relay their job, their family name, where they lived, and what their apartment looked like.
Except for Sabatino.
I asked her about him, but she didn’t know him by name. Describe him, she said.
He’s very old. This is his street name (the same as mine). One time I came home and he was playing the accordion on the street in front of my house.
She laughed, Well, how’s that supposed to be helpful? she asked. Everyone here plays the accordion.
After a few more descriptions, she realized who he was. Oh, she said, he’s sort of known for being a little crazy. He talks to people in dialectal idioms. No one can understand him.
I followed Sabatino down Via Loggia dei Mercanti, past jasmine hanging from medieval windows, past a pizza restaurant called CHARLIE I had never seen open, and all very slowly. I even hid a couple times. It was all so dramatic and for no reason. We toddled in the open across Piazza della Repubblica. I considered turning back. It took us around a half an hour to reach his destination, which was between Caffè Montanucci and Chiesa di Sant’Andrea. Under the columns, a cluster of benches that would have taken me about five minutes to reach alone. I’d walked by those benches many times before. They were where the elderly hung out.
He got pretty close to the benches and then stopped. He looked at the people sitting on them.
Then he turned and began to make his way back.
I followed him back too, and as we slunk home like a meditation, my eyes got all watery.
Is that what he was doing so many times a day?
Going to see if his friends were at the bench?
It was so moving to me and I cried when I told my roommate about it. She laughed. Why are you crying?
I don’t know. That’s just the most beautiful thing I can think of doing. Going to see if your friends are at the bench.
Maybe he just forgot something, she said.
—
That’s a memory that melts my restlessness and does something good to my soul, like reminds me I have one.
It puts me in a state that’s the opposite of boredom.
And I guess it’s true.
The only thing worth doing really is to see whether the people we actually like are at the bench.
xx
S.
did you ever ask him about it? were his friends alive? you've given me an insight to something so touching yet heart breaking and I'd love to know just a little bit more if you're willing to share :)