If after going through the works of any of these, you drop a book of prose picked from the shelf, it won't be your fault. If you continue to read it, that will be to the author's credit; that will mean that this author has indeed something to add to the truth about our existence as it was known to these few poets just mentioned; this would prove at least that this author is not redundant, that his language has an independent energy or grace. Or else, it would mean that reading is your incurable addiction. As addictions go, it is not the worst one.
Let me draw a caricature here, for caricatures accentuate the essential. In this caricature I see a reader whose hvo hands are occupied with holding open books. In the left, he holds a collection of poems; in the right, a volume of prose. Let's see which he drops first. Of course, he may fill both his palms with prose volumes, but that will leave him with self-negating criteria. And, of course. he may also ask what distinguishes good poetry from bad, and where is his guarantee that what he holds in his left hand is indeed worth bothering with.
Well, for one thing. what he holds in his left hand will be, in all likelihood, lighter than what he holds in the right. Second, poetr, as Montale once put it, is an incurably semantic art, and chances for charlatanism in it are extremely low. By the third line a reader will know what sort of thing he holds in his left hand, for poetry makes sense fast and the quality of language in it makes itself felt immediately. After three lines he may glance at what he has in the right.
This is, as I told you, a caricature. At the same time, I believe, this might be the posture many of you will unwittingly assume at this book fair. Make sure, at least, that the books in your hands belong to different genres of literature. Now, this shifting of eyes from left to right is, of course, a maddening enterprise; still, there are no horsemen on the streets ofTurin any longer, and the sight of a cabbie flogging his animal won't aggravate the state you will be in when you leave these premises. Besides, a hundred years hence, nobody's insanity will matter much to the multitudes whose number will exceed by far the total of little black letters in all the books at this book fair put together. So you may as well tnr the little trick I've just suggested.
In Praise of Boredom
But should you fail to keep your kingdom And, like your father before you come Where thought accuses and feeling mocks, Believe your pain . . .
—W. H. Auden, "Alonso to Ferdinand"
A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom. The reason I'd like to talk to you about it today, on this lofty occasion, is that I believe no liberal arts college prepares you for that eventuality; Dartmouth is no exception. Neither humanities nor science offers courses in boredom. At best, they may acquaint you with the sensation by incurring it. But what is a casual contact to an incurable malaise? The worst monotonous drone coming from a lectern or the eye-splitting textbook in turgid English is nothing in comparison to the psychological Sahara that starts right in your bedroom and spurns the horizon.
Known under several aliases—anguish, ennui, tedium, doldrums, humdrum, the blahs, apathy, listlessness, stolidity, lethargy, languor, accidie, etc.—boredom is a complex phenomenon and by and large a product of repetition. It would seem, then, that the best remedy against it would be constant inventiveness and originality. That is what you, young and newfangled, would hope for. Alas, life won't sup-
Delivered as a commencement address at Dartmouth College, in July 1^9.
ply you with that option, for life's main medium is precisely repetition.
One may argue, of course, that repeated attempts at originality and inventiveness are the vehicle of progress and—in the same breath—civilization. As benefits of hindsight go, however, this one is not the most valuable. For should we divide the history of our species by scientific discoveries, not to mention ethical concepts, the result will not be in our favor. We'll get, technically speaking, centuries of boredom. The very notion of originality or innovation spells out the monotony of standard reality, of life, whose main medium—nay, idiom—is tedium.
In that, it—life—differs from art, whose worst enemy, as you probably know, is cliche. Small wonder, then, that art, too, fails to instruct you as to how to handle boredom. There are few novels about this subject; paintings are still fewer; and as for music, it is largely nonsemantic. On the whole, art treats boredom in a self-defensive, satirical fashion. The only way art can become for you a solace from boredom, from the existential equivalent of cliche, is if you yourselves become artists. Given your number, though, this prospect is as unappetizing as it is unlikely.
But even should you march out of this commencement in full force to typewriters, easels, and Steinway grands, you won't shield yourselves from boredom entirely. If repeti- tiveness is boredom's mother, you, young and newfangled, will be quickly smothered by lack of recognition and low pay, both chronic in the world of art. In these respects, writing, painting, composing music are plain inferior to working for a law firm, a bank, or even a lab.
Herein, of course, lies art's saving grace. Not being lucrative, it falls victim to demography rather reluctantly. For if, as we've said, repetition is boredom's mother, demography (which is to play in your lives a far greater role than any discipline you've mastered here) is its other parent. This may sound misanthropic to you, but I am more than twice your age, and I have lived to see the population of our globe double. By the time you're my age, it will have quadrupled, and not exactly in the fashion you expect. For instance, by the year 2000 there is going to be such cultural and ethnic rearrangement as to challenge your notion of your own humanity.
That alone will reduce the prospects of originality and inventiveness as antidotes to boredom. But even in a more monochromatic world, the other trouble with originality and inventiveness is precisely that they literally pay off. Provided that you are capable ofeither, you will become well offrather fast. Desirable as that may be, most of you know firsthand that nobody is as bored as the rich, for money buys time, and time is repetitive. Assuming that you are not heading for poverty—for otherwise you wouldn't have entered college—one expects you to be hit by boredom as soon as the first tools of self-gratification become available to you.
Thanks to modern technology, those tools are as numerous as boredom's synonyms. In light of their function— to render you oblivious to the redundancy of time—their abundance is revealing. Equally revealing is the function of your purchasing power, toward whose increase you'll walk out of this commencement ground through the click and whirr of some of those instruments tightly held by your parents and relatives. It is a prophetic scene, ladies and gentlemen of the class of 1989, for you are entering the world where recording an event dwarfs the event itself—the world of video, stereo, remote control, jogging suit, and exercise machine to keep you fit for reliving your own or someone else's past: canned ecstasy claiming raw flesh.