Boring

May 27, 2009

What is boredom? The feeling of emptiness after a repetition. What is a repetition? Something done or experienced more than once.

Boredom is what eats away at the aesthete. The familiar is his enemy. He is always seeking novelty. By placing himself in unprecedented situations--or repeated situations with unprecedented actors--he is able to escape from boredom.

Nothing scares him more than the same exact experience twice. He is at once in the grip of and repelled by the temporal. Finitude is his pied-piper. He hates that time can be repeated--that there is a commonality to all present moments--and so always seeks the future, because it is unexperienced. As soon as he receives it, it becomes stale. His greatest desire is to be as a dog, lost in the chase of his own tale. He never stops, and thereby remains entertained.

Within the aesthete is the recognition of the finite's shortcomings. It cannot satiate with finality. He feels his inner hunger. He opts to gorge himself on sweets rather than settle for bland, but substantive, food. He is a forest fire burning through underbrush.

What is he after? A beautiful sensation.

What is sufficient about a beautiful sensation. It is interesting. It holds one's attention while it lasts. A beautiful sensation is enrapturing. It energizes one like sugar in the gas tank. A dog sniffs around in a lawn. This sent is new, then this one, and still this one over here. A dog lives in the transition between scents, in the search for difference. An aesthete, similarly, longs to discover, and is driven onward by the remnants of the previous sensation.

What is deficient about a beautiful sensation? It is disposable. One does not recycle a beautiful sensation. A pure aesthete never revisits the same painting. Once he has consumed it, it is has nothing to offer him in the future.

The aesthete is fundamentally hopeless. There is nothing normative in novelty. Boredom always wins the day, if given enough time. Finite permutations only go so far. Pleasures are limited. Yawns await. The most fitting end of the aesthete is suicide. When he realizes his body is no longer a fitting vehicle to new destinations, he drives it off a cliff. In the free-fall, he experiences his final newness. His crash echoes, but then as all that he is involved in and concerned about, it dissipates to nothing.

What if one is too cowardly or tired for suicide? Then one has enough courage and strength only to regret.