Gracchus

Roquentin, from Nausea:

I am bored, that’s all. From time to time I yawn so widely that tears roll down my cheek. It is a profound boredom, profound, the profound heart of existence, the very matter I am made of.

It’s true, I miss boredom, I’m no longer bored, I have too much to do, there’s always work and never the expanse between, that fog which billows up from the middle and obscures everything. Boredom: recall many years ago the madness of reading this and that preparing for an interview in the daytime. Sunlight through the window. Dust motes. It is the afternoon, the most frightening time, the time of dispersal. Pine trees over the houses opposite. The blue sky, too vast. Options: cycle to town. Catch the train from town to another town. Or stay here and drown in the afternoon. You are reading Kierkegaard; you take extensive notes.

Meanwhile, there is the day. You are – how old – twenty-three, twenty-four, already too old to endure the afternoon. You feel guilt: you’re not working. You’ve no money, and you’re not working. You know the great opportunity is close, that if you can get funding, everything will change. Everything depends on the interview. In the meantime, there is the day, the madness of the day. And there is a kind of boredom in which the day says to you: I am all there is. I am all there can be. That morning you had a dream. A cycle ride to Bracknell, only this is an unreal town, and nothing like Bracknell. You go to a library that is nothing like the library in Bracknell. Then you realise: this unreal town is the heart of all towns. It is every town and every suburb in the world. What does it matter where you are?

The dream fades and you wake up. Where were you? Where had you been. Days pass. You cycle to the woods. You know the lake is there … a break in the trees … promise of a vista. The lake. Stones to skim across the water. Somehow, you’ve been left behind. Boredom has caught you; you are enmeshed. As you imagine the weeds in the water would enmesh you.

The madness of the day: really you should disappear. Have the sense to disappear. Aberrant, out of time, you are up against the future, right up against it. Before, at the age of nineteen or twenty, there was all the time in the world – the future as the sky was then: distant, a blue screen upon which you could project many futures. But now: it is too close, unbearable close (that is what Bergman said once of the Mediterranean sky. I saw that sky once and had to agree).

The sky is too close and the future is right by you. The future says: what will you do? You have no words to reply. Because you understand the future’s question is the corrosion of your present. That it is coming apart, fraying. Like the celluloid that burns in Bergman’s Persona. What alibi do you have? What excuse can you give for your life? You have been pushed up against a white light. It is the day itself which interrogates you. The whole sky interrogates you. Only there is no answer to the day. The question turns. The question turns in the instant like a whirlwind. The question is boredom, a kind of acidic boredom which rots you from inside.

Yours is the condition of Gracchus, the man who could not die. The one who was dead-alive, alive in his death. You say to yourself: I am dead. Or: I have died. Or: everything is dead and only I am alive. Or: it is AD 51 and everything else that has happened is a lie.