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Saturday, July 01, 2006
Of bores and boredom
By Henrylito D. Tacio
Regarding Herny
THERE are bores and there's boredom. Sir Cecil Beaton said it all: "Perhaps the world's second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore. So, what is a bore in the first place?
Bert Leston Taylor defines: "A bore is a man who, when you ask him how he is, tells you." Gian Vincenzo Gravina contends: "A bore is a man who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company." Henry
Ford quips: "A bore is a fellow who opens his mouth and puts his feats in it."
What happens when two bores meet? Listen to the words of Don Marquis: "Bores bore each other too; but it never seems to teach them anything."
Money talks, so they claim. This must be the reason why when a millionaire tells a joke, everyone laughs, even if the joke is not funny.
"The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault," Henry Kissinger said. Nancy Astor is even more direct: "The penalty for success is to be bored by the people who used to snub you."
Yes, celebrities are very boring, too. Dylan Thomas admits: "Someone's boring me. I think it's me." To which George Saunders concurs: "Goodbye. I am leaving because I am bored." How nice if those boring people would follow suit.
Even Hollywood singer Barbra Streisand confesses that one reason she gave up performing in public is that listening to her own songs is boring. "It's boring to sing your own song," she said. "I remember going into Tahoe once, and I sang all new material because I was so bored with mine. The reviews, 'How dare she not sing 'People?'"
Ralph Waldo Emerson was right when he said, "Every hero becomes a bore at last." No was surprised when Friedrich Nietzsche declared: "Plato was a bore."
"I'm afraid of nothing except being bored," Swedish Greta Garbo once admitted. Eric Hoffer said, "When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored."
And that brings us to the subject of boredom. Experts define boredom as "a reactive state of emotion that interprets the condition of one's environment as wearingly dull due to repetitive, non-existent or tedious stimuli.
More often than not, boredom stems from a lack of interesting things to see, hear, or do (physically or intellectually) when not in the mood of "doing anything." Often it is a clearly subjective state; one person may find a classical music concert boring, for example, while another may find it riveting.
Those afflicted with temporary boredom may regard the affliction as a waste of time, but usually characterize boredom as far worse. Alternatively, one may have the feeling that having too much spare time causes boredom. Indeed, time often appears to move more slowly to someone who experiences boredom, resulting from the way in which the human mind measures the passage of time and by the infrequency of notable events.
Boredom can also occur as a symptom of clinical depression and may lead to impulsive (and sometimes excessive) actions that serve little purpose and could damage one's self interest.
Boredom is what makes us different from the monkeys. Lin Yutang explains: "Probably the difference between man and the monkeys is that the monkeys are merely bored, while man has boredom plus imagination."
Aldous Huxley wrote: "Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure."
Here's what Fritz Redl said about the subject: "Boredom will always remain the greatest enemy of school disciplines. If we remember that children are bored, not only when they don't happen to be interested in the subject or when the teacher doesn't make it interesting, but also when certain working conditions are out of focus with their basic needs, then we can realize what a great contributor to discipline problems boredom really is.
Research has shown that boredom is closely related to frustration and that the effect of too much frustration is invariably irritability, withdrawal, rebellious opposition or aggressive rejection of the whole show.
By the way, "the cure for boredom is curiosity," according to Ellen Parr. Unfortunately, "there is no cure for curiosity."
For comments, write me at tasyo2002@yahoo.com.
(July 1, 2006 issue)
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