From Lucretius to Moravia: a literary history of boredom

Talking about boredom today might seem far removed from the pressing and blatant issues of the day. For, despite an apparent apathy, the younger generations – whether Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012), or Generation Alpha (born between 2013 and 2024), appear to be actively involved in many public squares across Europe, where police are present and thousands of them, glasses in hand, are wreaking havoc on whatever they find in order to secure that status which, without needing to go to work, also allows them to protest violently and, come evening, find a roof over their heads. Boredom or discontent? Analyses diverge on this question, but behind an apparent rebellion lies a natural aggression that finds its outlet in smashing everything to pieces, probably to overcome precisely that boredom which seems to suffocate their daily lives – experienced as a realm of anguish and uncertainty, casting long shadows over their imagined future. In the following discussion, I shall attempt to examine how this aspect of human existence – boredom, to be precise – has permeated, like an invisible spectre, so much of the thought and suffering throughout the history of our civilisation.

When I was a beardless schoolboy, half a century ago, I used to visit my father at his farm in Montededaro – a hamlet in the Alte Madonie – at the weekends, with a vast horizon stretching out before me. When I asked him how he was getting on, particularly in the autumn and winter months, despite being a very hard-working man, he would reply: ‘I feel idle; I’m bored.’ Drawing on my recent studies, I quoted Machiavelli, who, in his letter to Francesco Vettori while in exile at San Casciano in Val di Pesa, described how he spent his days. The author of The Prince, unbeknownst to him, could not have imagined that he was the modern founder of ‘anthropological pessimism’. Yet my father, whilst listening to me in respectful silence, remained in his own frame of mind; and, pursing his lips as I tried to argue points that were abstruse to him, he emphasised, with his gaze, his state of listlessness, indifference and profound boredom.

Leaving it behind to resume my studies, with my curiosity still in its infancy, I then sought to explore that particular condition which, on the one hand, filled me with wonder, whilst on the other, it evoked a certain sense of sadness. Naturally, this was in an era still far removed from the search engines and artificial intelligence that today make life easier for anyone wishing to research a topic in any way. By consulting various works, often in dusty provincial libraries, I discovered that the term "boredom" derives from the Latin "in odio", subsequently adopted as a term from Provençal ("noia", "enoia", "enueg"), which tends to describe, with this word, a state of persistent demotivation, inactivity, idleness as the inability to accomplish anything through one’s own will, an inability to act with satisfaction, and monotony. All this is coupled with a pervasive sense of the futility of daily life which, when it takes on all-encompassing proportions and consumes one’s time, transforms into tedium (from the Latin taedium, which means, precisely, to feel boredom). Even earlier, however, the Greeks—founders of Western thought—had already intuited, through both Epicurus and the Stoic school, that dimension of contemplative existence focused on reflection, the emptiness of life, and awareness, foreshadowing the omnia vanitas of Qohelet. This is inevitably echoed by one of the greatest poets of the Latin world: Titus Lucretius Carus, heir to a suffering and anguished form of Epicureanism, who bears witness to the toil of living in a historical era characterised by civil wars but also by enormous wealth and incalculable resources derived from the empire and the nations conquered by the valiant Roman legions. It seems like a paradox, but that is precisely the case. In De rerum natura, the most subversive poet of the Roman world argued that those who seek to escape the pain of living, the loathing of oneself, are in fact fleeing because they are ignorant of the cause of their own suffering, the meaning of life and the fate that awaits after death, admitting that ‘no one knows what they want and always seeks to change their surroundings, as if they could lay down their burden… we move in the same circle and remain there forever’. In essence, a rebuke to the burgeoning debauchery and idleness defined precisely as taedium vitae, which heralded the decline of the empire.

In the Middle Ages, this state of being was also termed ‘accidia’, considered one of the seven deadly sins that characterised those who devoted themselves to a contemplative life. The term describes an aversion to action in which laziness, indifference and boredom coexist. In essence, it is concentrated and genuine indolence. Just as the Greeks had conceived it with the term a-khedos – meaning ‘without care’ – to denote an existential condition of inertia, torpor, sadness and melancholy, identified by Thomas Aquinas as the condition in which the ‘grief over the divine good’ manifested itself. In practice, a sort of spiritual despondency derived, in his view, from the loss of hope in salvation, equivalent to a profound inner malaise that no change of scenery, journey or different place could cure. Although Francesco Petrarca, in reviving this way of being, had equated acedia with an illness of the soul to which many sensitive individuals are drawn, taking pleasure in *voluptas dolendi* – in essence, a delight in pain and suffering. This condition was admirably interpreted in 1514 by the great German painter Albrecht Dürer in his famous engraving, which he titled Melancholia. At this point, it can be said that boredom, viewed from various angles, has run through the history of humanity to this day, given that, as mentioned above, numerous philosophers, artists, saints, writers and poets have spoken of it.

We may therefore concede that boredom, in literature, is not merely a waste of time or simple passivity, but a dimension of human existence whose sense of emptiness and precariousness also characterises the very greatness of human intelligence. Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher of unmasking, described it well when he argued that life is an oscillation between boredom and pain: the latter stems from desire, a state of lack which, when satisfied, gives rise to other needs; and when these too are fulfilled, the human being is overcome by that other terrible feeling: boredom. Pleasure is nothing but a brief interval between one desire and the next. Yet it also happened, during the great Romantic movement of the nineteenth century, that a man named Giacomo Leopardi, in his Zibaldone, went so far as to explain that boredom is man’s most sublime feeling. It is not an absence of things to do, but ‘life felt to the full’: that is to say, it arises from the unbridgeable gap between the human desire for the infinite and the finitude of reality. It is the void that remains after every illusion or pleasure has proved futile. This concept was embraced by Walter Benjamin, who, as an eclectic thinker, acknowledged that the feeling of boredom must not be confused with that of melancholy, especially in creative geniuses who, thanks to this condition, gain the value of the soul’s meditative reflection upon itself. It is therefore a positive quality that heralds creative activity, cognitive insight and inspiration (the enchanted bird that broods over the egg of experience).

Quite another matter, one might say, was Baudelaire’s Parisian ennui, expressed in his "Les Fleurs du Mal" or "Le Spleen de Paris", published a few seasons before the Paris Commune broke out in 1870. Faced with an evident collective malaise among different and unequal social classes, poverty and proletarian discontent, the poet, going against the grain, sang of the sentiments of those who, as we might say today, had their bellies full. Just as, a few centuries earlier, in the sixteenth century, another poet—a Sicilian from Monreale named Antonio Veneziano, a friend of Miguel de Cervantes who may well have inspired the character of Don Quixote—had maintained, with his verses: ‘the rich man does not believe the poor man / the sated man does not believe the hungry man’. Baudelaire, in opposition to any social uprising aimed at equality, sang of the psychological disorientation caused by the fumes of alcohol. “One must always be drunk. That is all: that is the only problem. To avoid feeling the horrible burden of Time, which breaks your back and keeps you down, you must get drunk without ceasing. But on what? On wine, poetry or virtue: as you please. But get drunk.” This may be described as an anarchic and hedonistic sentiment, far removed from brawls, knives and barricades, directed against industrialisation and the loss of human freedom, in which boredom is transformed into poetry to be committed to memory – perhaps with a touch of sad melancholy and suffering – yet one of great impact, given that, decades later, his verses were being taught in secondary schools and universities across half the world. And, remaining in France, what should be noted about the neo-existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus—the voices of two intellectuals who, within a very powerful and wealthy nation—a bourgeois civil society, one might say, sated with burgeoning comforts—were able to grasp the impotence of absolute freedom that devours itself, and whose fate seems to foreshadow the impotence of our own times, with the complexity of the present day, ethnic diversity, the desire to break free from stagnation by smashing everything to pieces, and the ferocious cry of revolt against a perceived economic disparity within Europe – perceived as a space no longer independent but subjugated to powers based elsewhere. One might say, of these advocates of ‘anti-boredom’, by dismantling Dante’s sublime concept of ‘ignavia’, that for them there is no failure to take sides between good and evil, as if they were fallen angels whom neither Hell nor Paradise accepts, perpetually pursued by bloodthirsty flies, because they are sinful souls ‘who were never truly alive’.

Thus Vitaliano Brancati, in 1937, in an exquisitely crafted short story—subversive and tragic for its time—entitled precisely "La Noia del ‘937", sublimely describes the state of mind of his protagonist, a certain Vannantò, at the height of virile and aggressive Fascism, in the remote town of Caltanissetta, where he gives vent to his aversion to the ruling regime: “In short, all that remained for him was to be bored, to be bored in the strangest and most varied ways, but simply to be bored. And this is what he did, shifting from a ravenous and ferocious boredom, which devoured all that was hateful around him, to a dull and leaden boredom, in which all that was vain and petulant faded away, like a cry in the mist, to a gloomy and black boredom that enveloped, in the chastising thought of death, everything that was stupidly jolly. Others believed they were acting, and he was bored; others believed they were enjoying themselves, and he was bored. He was bored almost to their faces, with the malice of someone who yawns in the speaker’s face to make it clear that they are talking nonsense.” Alberto Moravia sought to do much the same in 1960 when he published his novel, also entitled La Noia, in which he has the protagonist, Dino—a painter in crisis and utterly inadequate, assailed by boredom towards everything around him in the face of a reality he feels unable to fully grasp—utter phrases such as: “I didn’t know where I was going; it felt as though I were running in search of something which, no matter how far I ran, remained out of reach. When I was a child, boredom took on forms that were entirely obscure to myself and to others—forms I was unable to explain and which others, in my mother’s case, attributed to health problems or other similar causes.”

Just as is the case with certain characters in the novels of Pirandello, Svevo and many others. Or among singers such as Vasco Rossi and Angelina Mango, who have composed famous songs about boredom. At this point, one might well ask, after so many references, what exactly is boredom? From a psychological perspective, it can be defined as an emotion linked to a lack of stimulation which, if prolonged, can lead to feelings of frustration, dissatisfaction, difficulty concentrating and disinterest, and is perceived by those experiencing it, above all, as monotonous and lifeless. In its cognitive aspect, boredom is generally associated with a perception of time passing slowly, linked to problems with attention and concentration on a particular task. In practical terms, we could say it is a sense of disinterest caused by a lack of engagement with the activity at that moment. It is a state of apathy and a reduced ability to focus attention on a specific subject while chronological time appears to slow down. In this state the mind tends to wander or ‘daydream’ in search of more fulfilling activities. From an evolutionary perspective, however, boredom represents an adaptive reaction that arises when a situation ceases to be stimulating, leading to a reduction in an individual’s emotional intensity in relation to external circumstances. It signals the need to make a change in search of new stimuli, as current activities have become devoid of meaning. This means that emotions cannot be maintained at the same intensity indefinitely whilst working towards a particular goal. A form of mental fatigue sets in, which can naturally open the door to boredom; viewed in this light, boredom is a space for regaining vital energy rather than a paralysing indolence.

However, when an individual remains within their comfort zone for too long, boredom inevitably follows. The daily routine, automatic habits, the absence of danger, a careless and lazy complacency, a lack of new perspectives, an inability to experiment, and a dearth of imagination – combined with the lack of any need to earn a living – can, in very practical terms, be the direct path leading to boredom. However, like all human conditions, it feeds on other psychological dimensions, which may include depression – understood as a lack of motivation and a reduction in pleasure – anxiety, which triggers thoughts linked to worries about which one is unwilling to take courageous decisions; or the onset of greater impulsivity, which leads many individuals – particularly among the younger generations – to seek out destructive and risky activities, simply to counter their metropolitan boredom, characterised by anomie, an inability to form social bonds, a lack of shared experience, uncertainty about the future, scant interest in politics, and a lack of altruism. Boredom, however, may ultimately also be an opportunity which, whilst appearing as a lack of initiative, can pave the way for new and satisfying decisions. This was the experience of the author, who, during a summer in 1980, proposed a hitchhiking journey from Sicily to Copenhagen to a friend—carrying only a guitar and a small amount of money—in search of the legendary free community of Christiania.