Boredom: A Lively History by Peter Toohey

For Toohey, a key instructive novel about boredom is Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the story of a newly married woman who ruins her relationship and in the end loses her life essentially because she cannot bear to be bored. The wrong sort of literature, focused on dramatic incidents and unlikely plot twists, leads the unfortunate Emma Bovary to expect that there must be something wrong with her husband and her life in a quiet village, where the most exciting event to disturb the peace is the daily arrival of the newspaper from nearby Rouen. However, as Flaubert and Toohey hint, there is of course nothing amiss at all about a dull life — and to believe that there is is to risk throwing away genuine goods, such as a loving partner, a nice house and children. Toohey enforces the moral that Flaubert merely hints at: that we are all rather too obsessed with shiny bright excitements and would do well to hear the praises of the quiet life. There could be few things more radical in our day.

One of the pleasures of this languid, quietly interesting essay is its many illustrations. The author thanks his daughter Kate for guiding him to painters who were able to rehabilitate boredom and make us feel its charms. The Dutch artists of the 17th century were particular masters of “boring scenes”, which are in fact full of interest and touch us when we become aware that quiet family moments are not to be despised, but are in their own way achievements of civilisation.

The Dutch painters help us to recover positive associations of a word deeply connected with boredom: bourgeois. In the world of painters such as Pieter de Hooch, being bourgeois means dressing in simple but attractive clothes, being neither too vulgar nor too pretentious, having a natural relationship with one’s children, recognising sensual pleasures without yielding to licentiousness and knowing how to sit in a quiet room for what seems like a very long time with only a book or a window for distraction. By paying attention to the beauty of brickwork, of light reflecting off a polished door, the artists help us to find pleasure in omnipresent but neglected aspects of reality — and so prevent us from growing too addicted to the false lures of “excitement”.

Toohey doesn’t celebrate every aspect of boredom. He has illuminating things to say on why people become badly boring in social contexts. Shyness has a lot to answer for. We become scared of opening our souls because we falsely exaggerate the difference between ourselves and others. We imagine that others don’t share in our vulnerabilities or interests. We display only our strengths — and hence become annoyingly boring, for it is typically in the revelation of our weaknesses that people grow interesting.

There’s a brief history of boredom sketched out in this book, which alleges that we are now more prone to boredom than ever before, because the possibilities for distraction are so many. Children reared on a diet of television and gadgets aren’t ideal companions for the “quiet carriage” on long train journeys. Compare them with our forebearers who had no choice but to use their imaginations to stimulate themselves internally. Almost every evening of your life, you had to sit indoors by the light of a candle (if you were lucky), chat to a companion, or look out of the window and wait for sleep to carry you away. One of the more embarrassing challenges of our time is hence the task of relearning how to concentrate — which is linked to our ability to tolerate a degree of boredom. The past decade in particular has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible. Our fixation on “the news” is part of the problem. The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties — something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows. We are also continuously challenged to discover new works of culture — and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds. A student pursuing a degree in the humanities can expect to run through 1,000 books before graduation day. A wealthy family in England in 1250 might have owned three books: a Bible, a collection of prayers, and a life of the saints — this modestly sized library nevertheless costing as much as a cottage. The painstaking craftsmanship of a pre-Gutenberg Bible was evidence of a society that could not afford to make room for an unlimited range of works but also welcomed restriction as the basis for proper engagement with a set of ideas.

I take away from Toohey’s book the thought that the need to diet, which we know so well in relation to food, and which runs so contrary to our natural impulses, should be brought to bear on what we now have to relearn in relation to knowledge, people, and ideas. Our minds, no less than our bodies, require periods of boredom, of fasting — so that we can relearn how to focus.

An interesting aspect of boredom covered by Toohey is why different people respond with contrasting levels of excitement and boredom to the same things. Why will the average teenager become furiously bored during a Shakespeare play, unlike their older relations? Why do some of us get bored in museums while others manage to stay gripped? The trick is to be able to connect outer objects with vital inner interests. This, in the broadest sense, is the task often accomplished for us by a teacher, someone who can point out why a topic that seemed utterly remote is in fact relevant to one’s most acute concerns. The achievement of proper maturity is, the book points out, to be more and more interested by more and more things, because there is a place for them in the imagination. Curiosity might be pictured as made up of chains of small questions extending outwards, sometimes over huge distances, from a central hub composed of a few blunt, large questions. In childhood we ask: “Why is there good and evil?” “How does Nature work?” “Why am I me?”

If circumstances and temperament allow, we then build on these questions during adulthood, our curiosity encompassing more and more of the world until at one point we may reach that elusive stage at which we are bored by very little that is external to us. The blunt, large questions become connected to smaller, apparently esoteric ones. We end up fascinated by the wildlife on the side of a pond or a particular fresco on the wall of a 16th-century palace. We start to care about the foreign policy of a long-dead Iberian monarch or about the role of peat in the Thirty Years’ War. Unfortunately, places and objects do not tend to come affixed with the pedagogical material that will generate the necessary excitement — and that is why we so badly need inspiring teachers. It’s these guides who will build the patient bridges between our own egos and the world, and so lead us to find more of ourselves in increasingly foreign places and topics.

Toohey’s book belongs to a genre of literature now fortunately regaining favour among publishers: digressive essays, in which we circle a question by finding out a bit about the author, but also about literature, art history, philosophy and politics. Obviously the inquiry that the author must have faced 100 times while writing the book was: “Will I get bored reading this?” The answer is: in a rather beguiling way, sometimes, yes. This book is not dramatic, its charms take time to unfold; Emma Bovary would have put it down and gone back to her lover. But that would very much have been her loss, for there are plenty of fine things here to keep a receptive mind alert.

Alain de Botton’s most recent book is A Week at the Airport (Profile, £8.99)

Peter Toohey on depictions of boredom

Play Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov

Like so many of Chekhov’s plays and stories [it is] constructed around the theme of boredom. The young, pretty and feckless Yelena declares: “I’m dying of boredom ... I don’t know what to do.” She speaks for most of the characters in the play.

Painting The Cactus Lover by Carl Spitzweg

A clock presides over the eerily still scene ... its pendulum frozen at the point from which it begins its swing to the right, extending the moment of infinity. The cactus lover ... contemplates not the open window but the friendly cactus plant ... And cacti grow at an infinitesimal rate: more emphasis of the slowing or even of the cessation of time in this interminable, boring room.

Novel The Shining by Stephen King

A truly flamboyant and insightful representation of cabin fever and its association between chronic boredom and anger.

Boredom: A Lively History by Peter Toohey, Yale, 211pp, £18.09. To buy this book for £17.09 thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 08452712134