BOREDOM AND EXCITEMENT
Boredom as a factor in human behaviour has received, in my opinion, far
less attention than it deserves. It has been, I believe, one of the
great motive powers throughout the historical epoch, and is so at the
present day more than ever. Boredom would seem to be a distinctively
human emotion. Animals in captivity, it is true, become listless, pace
up and down, and yawn, but in a state of nature I do not believe that
they experience anything analogous to boredom. Most of the time they
are on the look-out for enemies, or food, or both; sometimes they
are mating, sometimes they are trying to keep warm. But even when
they are unhappy, I do not think that they are bored. Possibly the
anthropoid apes may resemble us in this respect, as in so many others,
but having never lived with them I have not had the opportunity to
make the experiment. One of the essentials of boredom consist in the
contrast between present circumstances and some other more agreeable
circumstances which force themselves irresistibly upon the imagination.
It is also one of the essentials of boredom that one’s faculties must
not be fully occupied. Running away from enemies who are trying to
take one’s life is, I imagine, unpleasant, but certainly not boring.
A man would not feel bored while he was being executed, unless he
had almost superhuman courage. In like manner no one has ever yawned
during his maiden speech in the House of Lords, with the exception of
the late Duke of Devonshire, who was reverenced by their Lordships in
consequence. Boredom is essentially a thwarted desire for events, not
necessarily pleasant ones, but just occurrences such as will enable the
victim of _ennui_ to know one day from another. The opposite of
boredom, in a word, is not pleasure, but excitement.
The desire for excitement is very deep-seated in human beings,
especially in males. I suppose that in the hunting stage it was more
easily gratified than it has been since. The chase was exciting,
war was exciting, courtship was exciting. A savage will manage to
commit adultery with a woman while her husband is asleep beside her,
knowing that it is instant death if the husband wakes. This situation,
I imagine, is not boring. But with the coming of agriculture life
began to grow dull, except, of course, for the aristocrats, who
remained, and still remain, in the hunting stage. We hear a great
deal about the tedium of machine-minding, but I think the tedium of
agriculture by old-fashioned methods is at least as great. Indeed,
contrary to what most philanthropists maintain, I should say that
the machine age has enormously diminished the sum of boredom in the
world. Among wage-earners the working hours are not solitary, while
the evening hours can be given over to a variety of amusements that
were impossible in an old-fashioned country village. Consider again
the change in lower middle-class life. In old days, after supper, when
the wife and daughters had cleared away the things, everybody sat
round and had what was called “a happy family time”. This meant that
paterfamilias went to sleep, his wife knitted, and the daughters wished
they were dead or at Timbuktu. They were not allowed to read, or to
leave the room, because the theory was that at that period their father
conversed with them, which must be a pleasure to all concerned. With
luck they ultimately married and had a chance to inflict upon their
children a youth as dismal as their own had been. If they did not have
luck, they developed into old maids, perhaps ultimately into decayed
gentlewomen--a fate as horrible as any that savages have bestowed upon
their victims. All this weight of boredom should be borne in mind in
estimating the world of a hundred years ago, and when one goes further
into the past the boredom becomes still worse. Imagine the monotony of
winter in a mediæval village. People could not read or write, they had
only candles to give them light after dark, the smoke of their one fire
filled the only room that was not bitterly cold. Roads were practically
impassable, so that one hardly ever saw anybody from another village.
It must have been boredom as much as anything that led to the practice
of witch hunts as the sole sport by which winter evenings could be
enlivened.
We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of
boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom
is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a
sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement. Girls nowadays earn
their own living, very largely because this enables them to seek
excitement in the evening and to escape “the happy family time”
that their grandmothers had to endure. Everybody who can lives in a
town; in America, those who cannot, have a car, or at the least a
motor-bicycle, to take them to the movies. And of course they have the
radio in their houses. Young men and young women meet each other with
much less difficulty than was formerly the case, and every housemaid
expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a
Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel. As we rise in the social
scale the pursuit of excitement becomes more and more intense. Those
who can afford it are perpetually moving from place to place, carrying
with them as they go gaiety, dancing and drinking, but for some reason
always expecting to enjoy these more in a new place. Those who have
to earn a living get their share of boredom, of necessity, in working
hours, but those who have enough money to be freed from the need of
work have as their ideal a life completely freed from boredom. It is
a noble ideal, and far be it from me to decry it, but I am afraid
that like other ideals it is more difficult of achievement than the
idealists suppose. After all, the mornings are boring in proportion
as the previous evenings were amusing. There will be middle age,
possibly even old age. At twenty men think that life will be over at
thirty. I, at the age of fifty-eight, can no longer take that view.
Perhaps it is as unwise to spend one’s vital capital as one’s financial
capital. Perhaps some element of boredom is a necessary ingredient in
life. A wish to escape from boredom is natural; indeed, all races of
mankind have displayed it as opportunity occurred. When savages have
first tasted liquor at the hands of the white men, they have found at
last an escape from age-old tedium, and, except when the Government
has interfered, they have drunk themselves into a riotous death.
Wars, pogroms, and persecutions have all been part of the flight from
boredom; even quarrels with neighbours have been found better than
nothing. Boredom is therefore a vital problem for the moralist, since
at least half the sins of mankind are caused by the fear of it.
Boredom, however, is not to be regarded as wholly evil. There are two
sorts, of which one is fructifying, while the other is stultifying. The
fructifying kind arises from the absence of drugs, and the stultifying
kind from the absence of vital activities. I am not prepared to say
that drugs can play no good part in life whatsoever. There are moments,
for example, when an opiate will be prescribed by a wise physician,
and I think these moments more frequent than prohibitionists suppose.
But the craving for drugs is certainly something which cannot be
left to the unfettered operation of natural impulse. And the kind of
boredom which the person accustomed to drugs experiences when deprived
of them is something for which I can suggest no remedy except time.
Now what applies to drugs applies also, within limits, to every kind
of excitement. A life too full of excitement is an exhausting life,
in which continually stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill
that has come to be thought an essential part of pleasure. A person
accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid
craving for pepper, who comes at last to be unable even to taste a
quantity of pepper which would cause anyone else to choke. There is an
element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much
excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but
dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations
for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged
surprises for beauty. I do not want to push to extremes the objection
to excitement. A certain amount of it is wholesome, but, like almost
everything else, the matter is quantitative. Too little may produce
morbid cravings, too much will produce exhaustion. A certain power of
enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of
the things that ought to be taught to the young.
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have
contained uninteresting stretches. Imagine a modern American publisher
confronted with the Old Testament as a new manuscript submitted to him
for the first time. It is not difficult to think what his comments
would be, for example, on the genealogies. “My dear sir,” he would say,
“this chapter lacks pep; you can’t expect your reader to be interested
in a mere string of proper names of persons about whom you tell him so
little. You have begun your story, I will admit, in fine style, and at
first I was very favourably impressed, but you have altogether too much
wish to tell it all. Pick out the high lights, take out the superfluous
matter, and bring me back your manuscript when you have reduced it to
a reasonable length.” So the modern publisher would speak, knowing the
modern reader’s fear of boredom. He would say the same sort of thing
about the Confucian classics, the Koran, Marx’s _Capital_, and all
the other sacred books which have proved to be best sellers. Nor does
this apply only to sacred books. All the best novels contain boring
passages. A novel which sparkles from the first page to the last is
pretty sure not to be a great book. Nor have the lives of great men
been exciting except at a few great moments. Socrates could enjoy a
banquet now and again, and must have derived considerable satisfaction
from his conversations while the hemlock was taking effect, but most
of his life he lived quietly with Xanthippe, taking a constitutional
in the afternoon, and perhaps meeting a few friends by the way. Kant
is said never to have been more than ten miles from Königsberg in all
his life. Darwin, after going round the world, spent the whole of
the rest of his life in his own house. Marx, after stirring up a few
revolutions, decided to spend the remainder of his days in the British
Museum. Altogether it will be found that a quiet life is characteristic
of great men, and that their pleasures have not been of the sort
that would look exciting to the outward eye. No great achievement is
possible without persistent work, so absorbing and so difficult that
little energy is left over for the more strenuous kinds of amusement,
except such as serve to recuperate physical energy during holidays, of
which Alpine climbing may serve as the best example.
The capacity to endure a more or less monotonous life is one which
should be acquired in childhood. Modern parents are greatly to blame
in this respect; they provide their children with far too many passive
amusements, such as shows and good things to eat, and they do not
realize the importance to a child of having one day like another,
except, of course, for somewhat rare occasions. The pleasures of
childhood should in the main be such as the child extracts himself from
his environment by means of some effort and inventiveness. Pleasures
which are exciting and at the same time involve no physical exertion,
such, for example, as the theatre, should occur very rarely. The
excitement is in the nature of a drug, of which more and more will come
to be required, and the physical passivity during the excitement is
contrary to instinct. A child develops best when, like a young plant,
he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much
variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them
as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.
I do not mean that monotony has any merits of its own; I mean only
that certain good things are not possible except where there is a
certain degree of monotony. Take, say, Wordsworth’s _Prelude_.
It will be obvious to every reader that whatever had any value in
Wordsworth’s thoughts and feelings would have been impossible to a
sophisticated urban youth. A boy or young man who has some serious
constructive purpose will endure voluntarily a great deal of boredom
if he finds that it is necessary by the way. But constructive purposes
do not easily form themselves in a boy’s mind if he is living a life
of distractions and dissipations, for in that case his thoughts will
always be directed towards the next pleasure rather than towards the
distant achievement. For all these reasons a generation that cannot
endure boredom will be a generation of little men, of men unduly
divorced from the slow processes of nature, of men in whom every vital
impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.
I do not like mystical language, and yet I hardly know how to express
what I mean without employing phrases that sound poetic rather than
scientific. Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth;
our life is part of the life of the Earth, and we draw our nourishment
from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is
slow; autumn and winter are as essential to it as spring and summer,
and rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more than to
the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and
flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted through the
ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the
festival of Easter. I have seen a boy of two years old, who had been
kept in London, taken out for the first time to walk in green country.
The season was winter, and everything was wet and muddy. To the adult
eye there was nothing to cause delight, but in the boy there sprang
up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in the wet ground and put his face
in the grass, and gave utterance to half-articulate cries of delight.
The joy that he was experiencing was primitive, simple and massive.
The organic need that was being satisfied is so profound that those
in whom it is starved are seldom completely sane. Many pleasures, of
which we may take gambling as a good example, have in them no element
of this contact with Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they
cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he
knows not what. Such pleasures bring nothing that can be called joy.
Those, on the other hand, that bring us into contact with the life
of the Earth have something in them profoundly satisfying; when they
cease, the happiness that they have brought remains, although their
intensity while they existed may have been less than that of more
exciting dissipations. The distinction that I have in mind runs through
the whole gamut from the simplest to the most civilized occupations.
The two-year-old boy whom I spoke of a moment ago displayed the most
primitive possible form of union with the life of Earth. But in a
higher form the same thing is to be found in poetry. What makes
Shakespeare’s lyrics supreme is that they are filled with this same joy
that made the two-year-old embrace the grass. Consider “Hark, hark, the
lark”, or “Come unto these yellow sands”; you will find in these poems
the civilized expression of the same emotion that in our two-year-old
could only find utterance in inarticulate cries. Or, again, consider
the difference between love and mere sex attraction. Love is an
experience in which our whole being is renewed and refreshed as is that
of plants by rain after drought. In sex intercourse without love there
is nothing of this. When the momentary pleasure is ended, there is
fatigue, disgust, and a sense that life is hollow. Love is part of the
life of Earth; sex without love is not.
The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer
is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth.
It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the
desert. Among those who are rich enough to choose their way of life,
the particular brand of unendurable boredom from which they suffer is
due, paradoxical as this may seem, to their fear of boredom. In flying
from the fructifying kind of boredom, they fall a prey to the other far
worse kind. A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it
is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.