Boredom

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  I threw my first empty coffee cup in the toppling pile of garbage around the trash can in the kitchen, broke back the lid of the second cup, downed a few trazodone, smoked a cigarette out the window, then flopped down on my sofa. I ripped open the M&M’s, ate them and a couple of Zyprexa, and watched Regarding Henry, dozing, the forgotten Klondike bar melting in my pocket. Reva showed up halfway through the movie with a huge tin of caramel popcorn. I answered the door on my hands and knees. “Can I leave this here?” she asked. “If I keep it at my house, I’m afraid I’ll eat it all.” “Uh-huh,” I grunted. Reva helped me up off the floor. I was relieved that she had no elaborately wrapped gift for me. Although Reva was Jewish, she celebrated every Christian holiday. I went to the bathroom, took my coat off, turned the pocket inside out and threw it in the tub. I let the water rinse away the melted Klondike bar. As the chocolate flowed down toward the drain, it looked like blood. “What are you doing here?” I asked Reva when I came back into the living room. She ignored the question. “It’s snowing again,” she said. “I took a cab.” She sat on the sofa. I reheated my half-drunk second cup of coffee in the microwave. I went to the VCR, moved the little elephant statue that I’d positioned to cover the glare from the digital clock. I rubbed my eyes. It was ten thirty. Christmas was almost over, thank God. When I looked at Reva, I saw that under her long black wool cape she was wearing a sparkly red dress and black stockings with boughs of holly embroidered on them. Her mascara was smudged, her face was droopy and swollen and caked with foundation and bronzer. Her hair was slicked back into a bun, shiny with gel. She had kicked off her heels and was now cracking her toe knuckles against the floor. Her shoes lay under the coffee table, tipped over on their sides like two dead crows. She wasn’t giving me any jealous, scornful looks, wasn’t asking if I’d eaten anything that day, wasn’t tidying up or putting the videotapes on the coffee table back in their cases. She was quiet. I leaned against the wall and watched her take her phone out of her purse and turn it off, then open the tin of popcorn, eat some, and put the cover back on. Something had happened, that was clear. Maybe Reva had gone to Ken’s Christmas party and watched him carouse with his wife, who she’d told me was petite and Japanese and cruel. Maybe he’d finally ended the affair. I didn’t ask. I finished my coffee and picked up the tin of popcorn, took it to the kitchen and emptied it into the garbage, which Reva had taken out, apparently, while I was washing my coat.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  Reva was quiet for a while, cold white puffs of air rising up off her tongue as she licked the long plastic spoon. The heating was way up. I was sweating under the fur. She stuck the McFlurry cup between her knees and continued to drive and eat. “You can take a nap in my room,” she said. “It should be quiet down there. My relatives are over, but they won’t think you’re being rude or anything. We don’t have to be at the funeral home until two.” We passed a high school, a library, a strip mall. Why anyone would want to live in a place like that was beyond me. Farmingdale State College, a Costco, five cemeteries in a row, a golf course, block after block of white picket fences with perfectly snowblown driveways and walkways. It made sense that Reva had come from a place as lame as this. It explained why she slaved away to fit in and make a home for herself in New York City. Her father, she’d told me, was an accountant. Her mother had been a secretary at a Jewish day school. Reva was, like me, an only child. “This is it,” she said as we pulled into the driveway of a tan-colored brick house. It was ranch-style and small, probably built in the fifties. Just by looking at it from the outside, I could tell that it had wall-to-wall carpeting, humid, sticky air, low ceilings. I imagined cabinets full of crap, flies flurrying around a wooden bowl of brown bananas, an old refrigerator covered in magnets pinning down expired coupons for toilet paper and dish soap, a pantry packed with cheap store-brand foods. It looked like the opposite of my parents’ house upstate. Their house was an eerily spare Tudor Colonial, very austere, very brown. The furniture was all dark, heavy wood, which the housekeeper polished religiously with lemon-scented Pledge. Brown leather sofa, brown leather armchair. The floors were varnished and shiny. There were stained-glass windows in the living room and a few large waxy plants in the foyer. Otherwise it was colorless inside. Monochromatic drapes and carpets. There was very little to catch your eye

• From Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition (2004)

  368 Lecture 55: Voltaire In the second half of the narrative, Candide decides his own fate by choosing an itinerary with the goal of fi nding Cunégonde. Returned to the real world from Eldorado, however, Candide’s quest is thwarted by all the predictable villainies of mankind, already seen in the fi rst half of the book. Cunégonde, our hero’s only hope of happiness, remains elusive until late in the narrative, when Candide and company rescue her and the Old Woman, who has protected her, from servitude in Constantinople, but Cunégonde is no longer as Candide remembers her. In the last chapter, Candide, Cunégonde, the Old Woman, Cacambo, Martin, and Pangloss settle together on a small plot of land in Turkey. When not arguing with each other, they inevitably encounter the last of human vices: boredom. They are tempted to rejoin the fray of humanity but consult some local elders fi rst. An old farmer tells them not to concern themselves with public affairs and just to work their land. The six of them take this advice to “cultivate [their] garden” and fi nd peace and happiness, if of an imperfect variety. V oltaire’s tale is a masterly example of the conte philosophique , the “philosophical tale,” which is a hybrid of philosophy and fi ction. The narrative structure relies on several popular genres for its shape: ● Morality or fairy tale ● Travelogue ● Romanesque or narrative in the style of medieval romance ● The picaresque—a narrative that recounts the adventures of the picaro (Spanish for a rogue or low-born adventurer) as he drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another. Realism is abandoned for hyperbole to underscore the absurd extremity of vice in the world, although V oltaire includes several real events in the story. The absence of realism extends to the depiction of characters: Like Molière’s characters, the actors are stereotypes.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  Now, I have a problem—a scientific problem. Although doing research in evolutionary biology has been a real joy for me, the community of science is not without diversity of opinion, disagreement, and intellectual conflict. And as it turns out, my ideas about aesthetic evolution run counter to the main flow of ideas in evolutionary biology—not just for the last few decades, but for nearly a century and a half, indeed, since the time of Darwin himself. Most evolutionary biologists, then and now, think that sexual ornaments and displays—they generally avoid using the word “beauty”—evolve because such ornaments provide specific, honest information about the quality and condition of potential mates. According to this “honest signaling” paradigm, the extraordinary electric-blue smiley face display on the erectable breast feathers of a male Superb Bird of Paradise (Lophorina superba) (color plate 2) functions like a birdie Internet dating profile, providing multiple pieces of information that a discerning female bird of paradise needs to know. Who are his “people”? Does he come from a good egg? Was he raised in a good nest? Does he have a good diet? Does he take care of himself? Does he have sexually transmitted diseases? In species of birds that form enduring pairs, such courtship displays may communicate additional information: Will he or she energetically defend our territory from competitors? Will he or she help feed and shelter me, be a good parent to our offspring, and be faithful to me? According to this BioMatch.com theory of ornament, beauty is all about utility. In this view, the subjective mating preferences of individuals are shaped by the objective quality of their available mates. Beauty is only desirable because it brings other, real-world benefits, like vigor, health, or good genes. Although sexual beauty may indeed be sensually pleasing, according to this view, sexual selection is just another form of natural selection; there is no fundamental difference between the evolutionary forces acting on the beaks of Galápagos Finches and those shaping the courtship displays of the birds of paradise. Beauty is merely the handmaiden of natural selection. This is very different from my own view of beauty and how it arises. Although I am rather hesitant to admit it, I think that the process of adaptation by natural selection is sort of boring. Of course, as an evolutionary biologist I am well aware that it is a fundamental and ubiquitous force in nature. I do not deny its immense importance. But the process of adaptation by natural selection is not synonymous with evolution itself. A lot of evolutionary process and evolutionary history cannot be explained by natural selection alone. Throughout this book, I will argue that evolution is frequently far quirkier, stranger, more historically contingent, individualized, and less predictable and generalizable than adaptation can explain.

• From Untrue (2018)

  But on the ground, things were somehow more complicated. I fell into a pattern: date a guy, have great sex, fall for him, get serious, get very serious, get bored. The next step was always to try to resuscitate a foundering, floundering thing, to convince my libido that we could and should make this work. What nice girl wouldn’t? What kind of young woman would just get psychosexual ennui and move unsentimentally, unromantically on? “C’mon, he’s a great guy,” I would coach myself and my libido. But my desires were hard to convince and even harder to bargain with. They took no prisoners and had other plans. These were: notice another guy, feel a tug of mutual attraction, and act on it. There were invariably messy, painful scenes when I was discovered, or when I just came out with it. Which I quickly learned was not the solution I had hoped it would be. Being direct about my desires, it turned out—“I really love being with you, but I’d like to be able to see other people” or “I’m into you, but monogamy is not easy for me”—was something my gay male friends, who had advised it, could get away with (as experts who work with them have pointed out, many gay couples were “consensually non-monogamous” avant la lettre). But my beaus were hurt, as I might have been in their position. They would say or do something hurtful in retaliation—imply I was a slut or just walk away, wounded and upset, as I might have done. Still, I couldn’t bear making them feel that way, any more than I could tolerate the sting of judgment, the feeling of having done something bad, of being bad. And while I felt the urge to play around on the side and couldn’t sustain interest in one man for as long as I felt I should, I didn’t want to be subjected to non-exclusivity myself. Hypocritically, I wanted to have affairs, but I didn’t want my partner to. As one vivaciously beautiful and intelligent woman in her late thirties told me, “I don’t want to be with a player, even though I want to be one.” Of course she added, “What the hell is wrong with me?!” She also lamented finding herself single and childless, pinning it on her “inability to settle down,” by which she meant “be monogamous.” While she wasn’t religious or politically conservative, she had her own catastrophic narrative about the Consequences of Female Infidelity. Don’t we all?

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as OmenYou both take jobs as standardized-test scorers at Pearson to make some extra cash. The building is low and squat, in a corporate park just outside Iowa City where the town gives way to cornfields. It reminds you of a job you had at nineteen when you were a glorified telemarketer, calling homeowners in the Lehigh Valley to convince them to replace their windows. You sit at long tables where there is a computer at each station. You wish you could grade essays, but you spend the majority of the time evaluating the sort of long-form math problems that gave you hives as a teen, laughing out loud at cheeky kids who make drawings or jokes or write “Fuck if I know” where the answer should be. It is mind-bendingly boring, but it is income, and the two of you even make a sort of friend: a woman who sits with you at lunch, and whom you often drive home. The hours are long, the breaks are short, and by the end of the day you are usually eating Cheetos from the vending machine and feeling bloated and pickled from the preservatives. You go to the bathroom a lot, mostly just to get your blood flowing and keep you from falling asleep. It is on one of these trips that you hear a woman sobbing in the handicapped stall next to you. You pee—except you peed half an hour ago, so it is barely a trickle—and after you wash your hands you rap lightly on the door and ask if she’s all right. She unlatches the door, hiccupping, a slender, small woman with huge, dark eyes. She says that she’s having a traumatic episode. You ask her if she wants to go outside, and she says yes, and the two of you go and sit on a patch of grass by the entrance to the building. She tells you that she was raped, a long time ago, and she has been struggling to get someone to believe her. The two of you begin to talk—well, she talks; you mostly listen and nod. The afternoon creeps by. You keep waiting for the boss to notice you’re missing, to come out and yell at you—but they either don’t know, or don’t care. At a certain point, you wonder what time it is, but you are afraid to interrupt the stream of her monologue by pulling out your phone.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  Beautiful, exotic blooms, all plastic, all covered with a heavy layer of dust. “They throw ’em away, just like they didn’t cost money,” my grandma would explain. I spent long days of blistering, stupefying boredom in that house, opening the refrigerator and staring into it forty times in an afternoon. Butter, milk, bowls with clumped food visible through their Saran Wrapped tops. There was stuff to eat to make you go to the bathroom, stuff to drink to make you go to the bathroom, and then several things to make you stop going to the bathroom. Nothing sweet whatsoever. She’d make a batch of cookies before I came and put them in the fat-chef cookie jar. I would eat all the cookies on the first morning, and then hunt relentlessly the rest of the week for something sweet. I would remember the cookies — greasy peanut butter ones with peanuts stuck in them, or chocolate chip ones with oatmeal — with a kind of hysterical longing. I couldn’t believe I had eaten every one of them the first morning. What could I have been thinking? I ate sugar cubes from the sugar bowl, one every hour or so. They were actually too sugary and each time I ate one I swore I wouldn’t do it again. But another hour later would find me creeping sock-footed out to the kitchen, lifting the plastic lid of the sugar bowl, and selecting another. Sometimes I would jump energetically on the beds, two twin ones that were in the room where I slept. I’d kung fu all the embroidered throw pillows onto the floor, and then jump and jump and jump, saying a Chinese jump-rope chant: “Chicka-chicka China, sitting on a fence, tried to make a dollar outta fifty-nine cents,” until I was so out of breath I had to collapse on my back and wait for the rotating fan to turn in my direction. Oh, the rotating fan. The lovely rotating fan, something that moved of its own accord in the dead house during the long afternoons. I would set the rotating fan on a footstool in the long, narrow bedroom. My job was to feed Kleenexes into it and then pick up the shredded pieces. By the end of one of those stultifying afternoons, I’d have an empty Kleenex box and a whole wastebasket full of soft pink confetti. Nobody ever questioned where the Kleenexes went when I was visiting, but once my grandma gave me another white-painted cigar box that was full of handkerchiefs, neatly pressed and folded. Every kind imaginable: flowered, embroidered, ones with Scottie terriers, ones with lace edges, the whole bit. They ate terrible food, things mixed together that weren’t supposed to be. Mashed potatoes with corn, pieces of white bread with gravy poured on top, peas and carrots in the same bowl. Ralph would have a dish towel tucked into his collar and hold a fork and spoon in his enormous paws.

• From Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (2006)

  WHY DO SO MANY COUPLES become erotically alienated? The list of factors that contribute to the waning of excitement is long, and the one most commonly invoked is stress. “As soon as I sit down, I see the laundry that still needs folding, the unopened mail, the strewn toys, and it takes all sexual desire away from me.” “Between our new jobs, our old parents, and our young kids, I’m wiped out. I don’t have a very strong sex drive to begin with, but right now I don’t have any desire for it at all. Don’t take it personally.” But when my patients cite the all-too-real stresses of modern life to explain why romance went south, I suggest that there may be more to it. After all, stress was a reliable feature of their lives long before they met, and it didn’t stop them from leaping into one another’s arms. In the next tier of justification they trot out the deeper problems in the relationship: the heated bickering and icy standoffs, the lack of trust, the chronic disappointments, the cycles of blame. “Sex? You must be kidding. After what you just said to me?” “When’s the last time you showed me you were interested?” “Do you think you could put just a little effort into making yourself attractive?” “I wish you’d shut the damned TV off; it makes me feel like dead meat.” This litany of disenchantment notwithstanding, I believe there’s an additional layer to our libidinal demise that has to do with our culture’s deep ambivalence around sexuality. While we recognize the importance of sex, we nonetheless vacillate between extremes of excessive license and repressive tactics: “Don’t do it till you’re married.” “Just do it when you feel like it.” “It’s no big deal.” “It’s a huge deal.” “You need love.” “What’s love got to do with it?” It’s an all-or-nothing approach to sex. Porn sites proliferate on the Internet, yet we continue to debate whether or not to provide sex education in our schools and, if so, whether we should call it “Sex Ed” or opt for the less graphic “Health Ed.” Despite living in a time of unprecedented sexual freedom in America, the practice of policing sexuality has continued unabated since the days of the Puritans. State intervention makes some of us breathe a sigh of relief while leaving others stricken with terror. We promote abstinence with fear-based tactics, threaten straying politicians with impeachment, fight gay marriage, and gnaw away at the fragile abortion laws. Though virginity seems a relic of a bygone era, every day our elected officials bring moral gravitas to the legislation of sexuality. Abortion, homosexuality, adultery, and “family values” have been active items on the national political agenda for more than thirty years. This sexual conservatism is rooted in the Puritan tradition, with its deep suspicion of pleasure and its moralistic attitude toward anything that strays from heterosexual, monogamous, marital, reproductive sexuality.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Slowly the rush would start to taper off and we’d wind down. We’d make our last collections, go over our CD stock, balance our accounts. If there was a party to DJ that night we’d start getting ready for that. Otherwise, we’d buy a few beers and sit around and drink, talk about the day, listen to the gunshots in the distance. Gunshots went off every night, and we’d always try to guess what kind of gun it was. “That’s a nine-millimeter.” Usually there’d be a police chase, cop cars flying through after some guy with a stolen car. Then everyone would go home for dinner with their families. I’d take my computer, get back in a minibus, ride home, sleep, and then come back and do it all again the next day. — A year passed. Then two. I had stopped planning for school, and was no closer to having the money to enroll. The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all. I was out there every day from seven a.m. to seven p.m., and every day it was: How do we turn ten rand into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? How do I turn fifty into a hundred? At the end of the day we’d spend it on food and maybe some beers, and then we’d go home and come back and it was: How do we turn ten into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? It was a whole day’s work to flip that money. You had to be walking, be moving, be thinking. You had to get to a guy, find a guy, meet a guy. There were many days we’d end up back at zero, but I always felt like I’d been very productive. Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA. Instead I was majoring in hustling, something no university would give me a degree for.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Babette entered a period of energy and optimism and began asking her out to nightclubs again. Babette had a lot of friends in the club business, so they could unfailingly sail past the block-long lines of people vainly trying to catch some doorman’s imperious eye. Babette, a tiny angular creature with long, slightly slanted eyes, looked annoyingly perfect in her silk Chinese jacket and black suede boots, her slim hip tilted one way, her little head the other. Stephanie always felt large and unraveled by comparison, as though her hat was wrong or her hem was falling out. They could spend hours wandering through the dark rooms, holding their drinks and shouting comments at one another. Often they would meet friends of Babette’s who would invite them into the bathroom for cocaine. Sometimes Babette would go off to dance and Stephanie would stand on the periphery of the dance floor, watching the dancers grinning and waving their arms in blind delight or staring severely at the floor as they thrashed their limbs. Lights flashed off and on, and the disc jockey spun one record after another in a pattern of controlled delirium. Stephanie would stroll through the club, watching the non-dancers blankly scrutinizing the dancers or standing in groups that were laughing with mysterious animation. After about fifteen minutes, she would be forced to face the fact that she was bored. Then she would remember what she was like before she came to New York and realize that this was what she had pictured: herself in a glamorous club full of laughing or morosely posing people. In frustration, she would decide that the reason it all seemed so dull was that she was seeing only the outermost layer of a complex society that spoke in ingenious and impenetrable signs to outsiders who, even if they were able to physically enter the club, were unable to enter the conversations that so amused everyone else. This was a discouraging idea, but it was better than thinking that the entire place was a nonsensical bore that people actually longed to belong in. “Hi,” said a man with a hideous hunk of hair. “I like your hat.” “Thank you.” “Would you like to dance?” “No, thank you.” She looked right at him when she said this, meaning to convey that she didn’t consider him repulsive, but that she was deep in thought and couldn’t dance. It didn’t work; he stared away with a ruffled air and then said, “Do you want to go to the Palladium?” “No, thank you.” He looked at her with theatrical scorn and she noticed that he was actually very handsome. “Are you French?” he asked. “No. Why do you ask? Do I sound French?” “I don’t know. You just look like you might be. Are you a dancer?” “No. Why?” “I don’t know. You have to be something.” He looked as if he was about to spit. “What do you do?” she asked.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Babette entered a period of energy and optimism and began asking her out to nightclubs again. Babette had a lot of friends in the club business, so they could unfailingly sail past the block-long lines of people vainly trying to catch some doorman’s imperious eye. Babette, a tiny angular creature with long, slightly slanted eyes, looked annoyingly perfect in her silk Chinese jacket and black suede boots, her slim hip tilted one way, her little head the other. Stephanie always felt large and unraveled by comparison, as though her hat was wrong or her hem was falling out. They could spend hours wandering through the dark rooms, holding their drinks and shouting comments at one another. Often they would meet friends of Babette’s who would invite them into the bathroom for cocaine. Sometimes Babette would go off to dance and Stephanie would stand on the periphery of the dance floor, watching the dancers grinning and waving their arms in blind delight or staring severely at the floor as they thrashed their limbs. Lights flashed off and on, and the disc jockey spun one record after another in a pattern of controlled delirium. Stephanie would stroll through the club, watching the non-dancers blankly scrutinizing the dancers or standing in groups that were laughing with mysterious animation. After about fifteen minutes, she would be forced to face the fact that she was bored. Then she would remember what she was like before she came to New York and realize that this was what she had pictured: herself in a glamorous club full of laughing or morosely posing people. In frustration, she would decide that the reason it all seemed so dull was that she was seeing only the outermost layer of a complex society that spoke in ingenious and impenetrable signs to outsiders who, even if they were able to physically enter the club, were unable to enter the conversations that so amused everyone else. This was a discouraging idea, but it was better than thinking that the entire place was a nonsensical bore that people actually longed to belong in. “Hi,” said a man with a hideous hunk of hair. “I like your hat.” “Thank you.” “Would you like to dance?” “No, thank you.” She looked right at him when she said this, meaning to convey that she didn’t consider him repulsive, but that she was deep in thought and couldn’t dance. It didn’t work; he stared away with a ruffled air and then said, “Do you want to go to the Palladium?” “No, thank you.” He looked at her with theatrical scorn and she noticed that he was actually very handsome. “Are you French?” he asked. “No. Why do you ask? Do I sound French?” “I don’t know. You just look like you might be. Are you a dancer?” “No. Why?” “I don’t know. You have to be something.” He looked as if he was about to spit. “What do you do?” she asked.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  Ordinary human suffering, ordinary human jealousy, ordinary human ambitions —it was just so much shit to me. I can visualize best my condition when I think of my relations with Maxie and his sister Rita. At the time Maxie and I used to go swimming together a great deal, that I remember well. Often we passed the whole day and night at the beach. I had only met Maxie’s sister once or twice; whenever I brought up her name Maxie would rather frantically begin to talk about something else. That annoyed me because I was really bored to death with Maxie’s company, tolerating him only because he loaned me money readily and bought me things which I needed. Every time we started for the beach I was in hopes his sister would turn up unexpectedly. But no, he always managed to keep her out of reach. Well, one day as we were undressing in the bathhouse and he was showing me what a fine tight scrotum he had, I said to him right out of the blue —“Listen, Maxie, that’s all right about your nuts, they’re fine and dandy, and there’s nothing to worry about but where in hell is Rita all the time, why don’t you bring her along some time and let me take a good look at her quim . . . yes, quim, you know what I mean.” Maxie, being a Jew from Odessa, had never heard the word quim before. He was deeply shocked by my words and yet at the same time intrigued by this new word. In a sort of daze he said to me—“Jesus, Henry, you oughtn’t to say a thing like that to me!” “Why not?” I answered. “She’s got a cunt, your sister, hasn’t she?” I was about to add something else when he broke into a terrific fit of laughter. That saved the situation, for the time being. But Maxie didn’t like the idea at all deep down. All day long it bothered him, though he never referred to our conversation again. No, he was very silent that day. The only form of revenge he could think of was to urge me to swim far beyond the safety zone in the hope of tiring me out and letting me drown. I could see so clearly what was in his mind that I was possessed with the strength of ten men. Damned if I would go drown myself just because his sister like all other women happened to have a cunt. It was at Far Rockaway where this took place. After we had dressed and eaten a meal I suddenly decided that I wanted to be alone and so, very abruptly, at the corner of a street, I shook hands and said good-by. And there I was!

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  Stephanie would stroll through the club, watching the non-dancers blankly scrutinizing the dancers or standing in groups that were laughing with mysterious animation. After about fifteen minutes, she would be forced to face the fact that she was bored. Then she would remember what she was like before she came to New York and realize that this was what she had pictured: herself in a glamorous club full of laughing or morosely posing people. In frustration, she would decide that the reason it all seemed so dull was that she was seeing only the outermost layer of a complex society that spoke in ingenious and impenetrable signs to outsiders who, even if they were able to physically enter the club, were unable to enter the conversations that so amused everyone else. This was a discouraging idea, but it was better than thinking that the entire place was a nonsensical bore that people actually longed to belong in. “Hi,” said a man with a hideous hunk of hair. “I like your hat.” “Thank you.” “Would you like to dance?” “No, thank you.” She looked right at him when she said this, meaning to convey that she didn’t consider him repulsive, but that she was deep in thought and couldn’t dance. It didn’t work; he stared away with a ruffled air and then said, “Do you want to go to the Palladium?” “No, thank you.” He looked at her with theatrical scorn and she noticed that he was actually very handsome. “Are you French?” he asked. “No. Why do you ask? Do I sound French?” “I don’t know. You just look like you might be. Are you a dancer?” “No. Why?” “I don’t know. You have to be something.” He looked as if he was about to spit. “What do you do?” she asked. “I’m an architect. Do you want some coke?” “No, thank you.” He looked at her as though she were completely mad and walked away. She quickly moved off the spot of this encounter toward a roomful of people in groups, determined to hear at least part of an interesting conversation. She was stopped by a man who wanted to know if she was Italian. She said no and escaped him. She was continuing toward a courtly group of large, aging transvestites who were the most welcoming and companionable bunch she’d seen all night when a very handsome black man took her elbow and said, “Bonsoir. Are you French?” “No.” “Italian?” “No.” His faced changed a shade. “What are you?” “I’m from Illinois.” He dropped her elbow with unmistakable contempt and turned his back to her. That was the last straw. She walked out of the club and into the street, not even bothering to look for Babette. She walked ten blocks in her high heels, and was almost home when she decided to stop at a neighborhood lesbian bar. It would be comfortable, she thought, to get drunk in the company of jovial women.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  ‘Please make Mac a better Christian,’ she said. And me lying there with a limp cock listening to her. I didn’t know whether I was dreaming or what. ‘Please make Mac a better Christian!’ Can you beat that?” “What are you doing tonight?” he added cheerfully. “Nothing special,” I said. “Then come along with me. I’ve got a gal I want you to meet. . . . Paula . I picked her up at the Roseland a few nights ago. She’s not crazy—she’s just a nymphomaniac. I want to see you dance with her. It’ll be a treat . . . just to watch you. Listen, if you don’t shoot off in your pants when she starts wiggling, well then I’m a son of a bitch. Come on, close the joint. What’s the use of farting around in this place?” There was a lot of time to kill before going to the Roseland so we went to a little hole in the wall over near Seventh Avenue. Before the war it was a French joint; now it was a speakeasy run by a couple of wops. There was a tiny bar near the door and in the back a little room with a sawdust floor and a slot machine for music. The idea was that we were to have a couple of drinks and then eat. That was the idea . Knowing him as I did, however, I wasn’t at all sure that we would be going to the Roseland together. If a woman should come along who pleased his fancy—and for that she didn’t have to be either beautiful or sound of wind and limb—I knew he’d leave me in the lurch and beat it. The only thing that concerned me, when I was with him, was to make sure in advance that he had enough money to pay for the drinks we ordered. And, of course, never let him out of my sight until the drinks were paid for. The first drink or two always plunged him into reminiscence. Reminiscences of cunt to be sure. His reminiscences were reminiscent of a story he had told me once and which made an indelible impression upon me. It was about a Scotchman on his deathbed. Just as he was about to pass away his wife, seeing him struggling to say something, bends over him tenderly and says—“What is it, Jock, what is it ye’re trying to say?” And Jock, with a last effort, raises himself wearily and says: “Just cunt . . . cunt . . . cunt.” That was always the opening theme, and the ending theme, with MacGregor. It was his way of saying—futility . The leitmotif was disease, because between fucks, as it were, he worried his head off, or rather he worried the head off his cock.

• From Bad Behavior (1988)

  I’m going to quit next week.” “If you do, you must give me your phone number. I’d really like to keep in touch with you. It doesn’t have to be any big deal. I just think you’re an interesting girl.” She didn’t see him before she quit, nor did he call her right away. When a week went by, she decided he’d changed his mind. She felt disappointed, but also relieved, and then stopped thinking about it. She eased back into her life slowly, first looking for another job and then trying to write every day. Babette entered a period of energy and optimism and began asking her out to nightclubs again. Babette had a lot of friends in the club business, so they could unfailingly sail past the block-long lines of people vainly trying to catch some doorman’s imperious eye. Babette, a tiny angular creature with long, slightly slanted eyes, looked annoyingly perfect in her silk Chinese jacket and black suede boots, her slim hip tilted one way, her little head the other. Stephanie always felt large and unraveled by comparison, as though her hat was wrong or her hem was falling out. They could spend hours wandering through the dark rooms, holding their drinks and shouting comments at one another. Often they would meet friends of Babette’s who would invite them into the bathroom for cocaine. Sometimes Babette would go off to dance and Stephanie would stand on the periphery of the dance floor, watching the dancers grinning and waving their arms in blind delight or staring severely at the floor as they thrashed their limbs. Lights flashed off and on, and the disc jockey spun one record after another in a pattern of controlled delirium. Stephanie would stroll through the club, watching the non-dancers blankly scrutinizing the dancers or standing in groups that were laughing with mysterious animation. After about fifteen minutes, she would be forced to face the fact that she was bored. Then she would remember what she was like before she came to New York and realize that this was what she had pictured: herself in a glamorous club full of laughing or morosely posing people. In frustration, she would decide that the reason it all seemed so dull was that she was seeing only the outermost layer of a complex society that spoke in ingenious and impenetrable signs to outsiders who, even if they were able to physically enter the club, were unable to enter the conversations that so amused everyone else.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  There were a hundred and one offices to look after and each one had a staff of messengers which was mythical, if not hypothetical, and whether the messengers were real or unreal, tangible or intangible, Hymie had to shuffle them about from morning to night while I plugged up the holes, which was also imaginary because who could say when a recruit had been dispatched to an office whether he would arrive there today or tomorrow or never. Some of them got lost in the subway or in the labyrinths under the skyscrapers; some rode around on the elevated line all day because with a uniform it was a free ride and perhaps they had never enjoyed riding around all day on the elevated lines. Some of them started for Staten Island and ended up in Canarsie, or else were brought back in a coma by a cop. Some forgot where they lived and disappeared completely. Some whom we hired for New York turned up in Philadelphia a month later, as though it were normal and according to Hoyle. Some would start for their destination and on the way decide that it was easier to sell newspapers and they would sell them, in the uniform we had given them, until they were picked up. Some went straight to the observation ward, moved by some strange preservative instinct. When he arrived in the morning Hymie first sharpened his pencils; he did this religiously no matter how many calls were coming in, because, as he explained to me later, if he didn’t sharpen the pencils first thing off the bat they would never get sharpened. The next thing was to take a glance out the window and see what the weather was like. Then, with a freshly sharpened pencil he made a little box at the head of the slate which he kept beside him and in it he gave the weather report. This, he also informed me, often turned out to be a useful alibi. If the snow were a foot thick or the ground covered with sleet, even the devil himself might be excused for not shuffling the waybills around more speedily, and the employment manager might also be excused for not filling up the holes on such days, no?

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  In the first case, trying so many things out, we never really develop solid skills in one particular area. We find it hard to focus on a specific activity for too long because we are so used to flitting around and distracting ourselves, which makes it doubly hard to learn new skills if we want to. Because of this our career possibilities begin to narrow. We become trapped into moving from one job to another. We might now want a relationship that lasts, but we haven’t developed the tolerance for compromise, and we cannot help but bristle at the restrictions to our freedom that a lasting relationship will represent. Although we might not like to admit it to ourselves, our freedom can begin to wear on us. In the second case, the career we committed to in our twenties might begin to feel a bit lifeless in our thirties. We chose it for practical purposes, and it has little connection to what actually interests us in life. It begins to feel like just a job. Our minds disengage from the work. And now that smorgasbord of opportunities in the modern world begins to tempt us as we reach midlife. Perhaps we need some new, exciting career or relationship or adventure. In either case, we do what we can to manage our frustrations. But as the years go by, we start to experience bouts of pain that we cannot deny or repress. We are generally unaware of the source of our discomfort—the lack of purpose and true direction in our lives. This pain comes in several forms. We feel increasingly bored . Not really engaged in our work, we turn to various distractions to occupy our restless minds. But by the law of diminishing returns, we need to continually find new and stronger forms of diversion—the latest trend in entertainment, travel to an exotic location, a new guru or cause to follow, hobbies that are taken up and abandoned quickly, addictions of all kinds. Only when we are alone or in down moments do we actually experience the chronic boredom that motivates many of our actions and eats away at us. We feel increasingly insecure . We all have dreams and a sense of our own potential. If we have wandered aimlessly through life or gone astray, we begin to become aware of the discrepancy between our dreams and reality. We have no solid accomplishments. We feel envious of those who do. Our ego becomes brittle, placing us in a trap. We are too fragile to take criticism. Learning requires an admission that we don’t know things and need to improve, but we feel too insecure to admit this, and so our ideas become set and our skills stagnate.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  listening to authority figures is old-fashioned. Better to explore, have fun, and be open. A time will come when we will figure out what exactly to do with our lives. In the meantime, maintaining the freedom to do as we wish and go where we please becomes our main motivation. Some of us, however, react the opposite way: Frightened of the chaos, we quickly opt for a career that is practical and lucrative, hopefully related to some of our interests, but not necessarily. We settle on an intimate relationship. We may even continue to cling to our parents. What motivates us is to somehow establish the stability that is so hard to find in this world. Both paths, however, tend to lead to some problems further down the road. In the first case, trying so many things out, we never really develop solid skills in one particular area. We find it hard to focus on a specific activity for too long because we are so used to flitting around and distracting ourselves, which makes it doubly hard to learn new skills if we want to. Because of this our career possibilities begin to narrow. We become trapped into moving from one job to another. We might now want a relationship that lasts, but we haven’t developed the tolerance for compromise, and we cannot help but bristle at the restrictions to our freedom that a lasting relationship will represent. Although we might not like to admit it to ourselves, our freedom can begin to wear on us. In the second case, the career we committed to in our twenties might begin to feel a bit lifeless in our thirties. We chose it for practical purposes, and it has little connection to what actually interests us in life. It begins to feel like just a job. Our minds disengage from the work. And now that smorgasbord of opportunities in the modern world begins to tempt us as we reach midlife. Perhaps we need some new, exciting career or relationship or adventure. In either case, we do what we can to manage our frustrations. But as the years go by, we start to experience bouts of pain that we cannot deny or repress. We are generally unaware of the source of our discomfort—the lack of purpose and true direction in our lives. This pain comes in several forms. We feel increasingly bored . Not really engaged in our work, we turn to various distractions to occupy our restless minds. But by the law of diminishing returns, we need to continually find new and stronger forms of diversion—the latest trend in entertainment, travel to an exotic location, a new guru or cause to follow, hobbies that are taken up and abandoned quickly, addictions of all kinds. Only when we are alone or in down moments do we actually experience the chronic boredom that motivates many of our actions and eats away at us.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  paychecks. Their career choices have slight or no connection to their actual inclinations. The fields they choose will tend to be crowded with other insatiable hunters of money and success, and so the competition is fierce. If they are zealous enough, they might do quite well for a while, but as they get older, they begin to feel restless and ever so slightly bored. They try different avenues for money and success; they need new challenges. They have to keep finding ways to motivate themselves. Often they make big mistakes in their obsessive pursuit of money because their thinking is so short term, as we saw with those who went all in on the derivatives frenzy leading up to the crash of 2008. Second, money and success that last come from remaining original and not mindlessly following the path that others are following. If we make money our primary goal, we never truly cultivate our uniqueness, and eventually someone younger and hungrier will supplant us. And finally, what often motivates people in this quest is to simply have more money and status than other people, and to feel superior. With that standard, it is difficult to know when they have enough, because there are always people with more. And so the quest is endless and exhausting. And since the connection to their work is not personal, such people become alienated from themselves; the pursuit feels soulless; they are workaholics without a true calling. They may become depressed or manic, and they will often lose what they have gained if they become manic enough. We all know the effects of “hyperintention”: If we want and need desperately to sleep, we are less likely to fall asleep. If we absolutely must give the best talk possible at some conference, we become hyperanxious about the result, and the performance suffers. If we desperately need to find an intimate partner or make friends, we are more likely to push them away. If instead we relax and focus on other things, we are more likely to fall asleep or give a great talk or charm people. The most pleasurable things in life occur as a result of something not directly intended and expected. When we try to manufacture happy moments, they tend to disappoint us. The same goes for the dogged pursuit of money and success. Many of the most successful, famous, and wealthy individuals do not begin with an obsession with money and status. One prime example would be Steve Jobs, who amassed quite a fortune in his relatively short life. He actually cared very little for material possessions. His singular focus was on creating the best and most original designs, and when he did so, good fortune followed him. Concentrate on maintaining a high sense of purpose, and the success will flow to you naturally. Attention: People have always pursued fame and attention as a way to feel enlarged and more important. They become dependent

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  The place was smelly and oppressive, but the grown-ups, their tongues loosened by martinis, settled in for a long stay. The two women, seated next to each other, talked Paris fashions and assured each other no one would wear the Parachute. Mr. Cork, more Republican than the republic, was discerning a Communist conspiracy in every national mishap. I could see my father wasn’t convinced, least of all by Mr. Cork’s ardor; Dad took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes and nodded rhythmically through the harangue, his polite way of shielding himself from a loudmouth, of immigrating inward. Little Peter had turned a celery stalk from the relish tray into an Indian canoe and Kevin was sniping at it from the chalky promontory of a flour-dusted dinner roll; the massacre was carried out in whispered sound effects. “Kevin O’Malley Cork, how many times must I tell you not to play with your food!” “Aw, Maw.” On and on the meal devolved. The organist’s pale forehead glittering under his black wig, his teeth bared, he moved from a pathetic “Now Is the Hour” with copious vibrato into a “Zip-a-Dee Doo-Dah” with a Latin beat. The waitress tempted everyone with pie—stewed apples and cinnamon enclosed in envelopes of pastry that looked like pressed Leatherette, each wedge, of course, à la mode. Coffee for the grownups, more milk for the kids. The bill. The argument over it. The change. The second cigar. The mints. The toothpicks. The crème de menthe frappés and the B and B’s. More coffee. The tip. “Good night, folks. Hurry back!” Another tip for the organist, who nods grateful acknowledgment while staying right in there with “Kitten on the Keys.”