Saturday 2 June 2007

The experience of boredom

We can talk of experience as the remedy for boredom; and we can talk of boredom as a wished-for escape from experience—boredom, in other words, as a kind of haven or refuge from an exhausting and over-hectic world. But neither of these fully captures the extent that, in a world free from the more visceral fears of a hunted creature amongst predators (a world most people—a few addicts to Russian roulette excepted—are happy not to live in) all experience is grounded in a surfeit of boredom, just as all boredom is grounded in a surfeit of experience.

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