Reading Bored

This essay was written by Henry Purser, a BYU Humanities Center student fellow.

Recently, people from all over the disciplinary spectrum have taken up boredom as an object of curiosity. Consider, for example, David C. Brooks’s (locally famous for the BYU briefcase anecdote) YouTube segment “You Need to Be Bored. Here’s Why”: A little over a year after its release, the video has notched over 17 million views—more than double the channel’s second most popular. And that interest is not an isolated incident: In 2016, Routledge published a boredom studies anthology, and in 2021, Rye Dag Holmboe and Susan Morris edited a collection of essays on boredom in art and writing. Heck—there’s even a journal of boredom studies now, conveniently titled Journal of Boredom Studies, currently on its fourth issue. Given the recent interest, we might fiddle with the boundaries of what Michael Newman has termed the “period of great boredom” (the period of history in which boredom was most prevalent). [1] Newman begins this period in 1890 and terminates it in 1960, but I might scoot that start date earlier to accommodate Schopenhauer’s work in the late 1810s and Dickens’s “great malady of boredom” in the 1850s; and I might push that end date later to account for Rohmer’s later films in the 1970s and 80s and Peter Toohey’s 2011 monograph, Boredom: A Lively History.

A lively history indeed. Many of the accounts just referenced refer to conceptions that wind across the categories of media, experience, affect, mood, aesthetics, ontology, method . . . and so on. Because of those sprawling possibilities, I’ll consider here only what boredom makes possible in our attention to a text. To that end, Patricia Clare Ingham recently broached the question of boredom by way of its flipside: “curiosity and its vicissitudes.” [2] She did so to tease out curiosity’s place in the method wars, but concluded her essay with a note on boredom, writing, “boredom remains embedded in a long history of thinking about curiosity . . . as a curious practice, productive and promising all on its own.” [2] Though a brilliant account of curiosity in its own right, her foray does not interrogate the “productive and promising” mode of boredom she proposes. So taking our cue from where she leaves off, we could ask here how boredom bears down on those whose curiosity wanes after sustained periods of attention. Or better yet, we could ask what it means to begin reading from a space of boredom, a question that might resonate with students who yawn before the dense walls of texts that shore up their assigned readings. That question is equally as relevant to leisurely readers and the daunting “classics” their overzealous book clubs choose, as well as to those who skim automobile manuals, corporate protocols, contracts, and shopping lists.

I, for one, have fit all these descriptions at one time or another, leading me to ask this question: what are the upsides of reading bored? For answers (or something like them), I turn to a poet who was himself taken with boredom: George Oppen. His 1934 debut collection Discrete Series begins with a poem on reading bored:

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were

saying, but of boredom

Is—aside from reading speaking

smoking—

Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was,

wished to know when, having risen,

“approached the window as if to see

what really was going on”;

And saw rain falling, in the distance

more slowly,

The road clear from her past the window-

glass—

Of the world, weatherswept, with which

one shares the century. [3]

Boredom registers on multiple levels here: in mood, content, and method. The poet’s voice flits lazily along each of the poem’s first eight lines, distractedly interrupting itself to supply previously omitted details: “aside from reading speaking / smoking,” the poet offhandedly remarks, and “Maude Blessingbourne it was,” they remember. That voice tells us of Maude’s—from Henry James’s “The Story of It”—desire to know “the knowledge. . . of boredom” in her approaching the window. In so searching for boredom, Maude sees only “the world, weatherswept, with which / one shares the century.” In that respect, the poet’s indifferent tone and Maude’s search for boredom find analogy, as many critics have argued, in Martin Heidegger’s 1929-30 lectures on boredom (which Oppen later read but had not at the time). As Heidegger put it elsewhere, “profound boredom . . . removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference.” [4] Oppen himself later paraphrased Heidegger in response to a question on the poem, observing how “the word ‘boredom’ is a little surprising there. It means, in effect, that the knowledge of the mood of boredom is the knowledge of what is.” [5] That’s loosely the mood in which Maude looks through the window: as James describes and Oppen quotes, she approaches the window only “as if” to see through it, though she really doesn’t, per se, intend to look. She’s rather indifferent to what she might see, meaning only to wrest the attention of her friend, Mrs. Doytt, from her letter writing. Maude’s looking through the window, then, is a look already absorbed in, maybe even compelled by, boredom. And yet despite her “as if,” in the poem, Maude does see the world on the other side of the window’s glass. That vision arrives aslant her bored attention, indirectly and unexpectedly washing over her.

At this point we might well exclaim, “Aha! Maude reads while bored!” And that’s true, but we could also speculate a touch more by recognizing how the poet reads Maude’s act as would a bored reader. In taking up this textual moment, the poetic voice narrating Maude’s boredom wanders in distracted indifference beyond the text. Where James in his story swiftly marches past Maude’s move to the window and toward her interest in French novels (the novel at hand is interesting “well enough,” she says), the poet drops the text to linger on what Maude might have seen in her bored look through the window. With the semicolon, the poet marks the end of their most explicit engagement with the text of James’s story; after the mark, that textual engagement gives rise to something beyond the story, and the poet’s imagination veers elsewhere. Because the poem after the semicolon omits the subject to “saw,” it becomes unclear who is now doing the seeing. Though James’s story had earlier detailed the outside “storm gather[ing] force,” the poet and Maude see otherwise, gazing at the “rain falling, in the distance / more slowly.” By loosening their attention to a text they boredly peruse, the poet discovers something extraneous to James’s text, offset by the closing em dash. This discovery comes not as an epiphanic flash of textual insight, but as a hazy lucidity of vision that reveals the “world, weatherswept, with which / one shares the century.”

Returning to our organizing question, we could see Maude’s look out the window and the poet’s reading of that look as examples of what reading bored offers readers. Where Ingham sees curiosity “renewing our facility for knowing, for reading, for loving, for puzzling out, for critiquing, for caring,” in light of Oppen’s Maude, we might find boredom expanding our capacities for perceiving, seeing, sharing, exploring, and, perhaps most prominently, imagining. [3] That’s not to say, of course, that reading bored is always fruitful; it’s not. (Just the other day I sped through an article on sports law, only to reach the end and realize I’d forgotten everything.) It is to say, however, that boredom might alter the ways in which we relate to our texts by loosening our attentive attachments to them, leading us somewhere other than the next words on the page.

References:

[1] Newman, Michael. “The Long and the Short of It: Boredom after the End of the Great Boredom.” On Boredom: Essays in Art and Writing, Ed. Rye Dag Holmboe, Susan Morris, UCL Press, 2021, pp. 109-141
[2] Ingham, Patricia Clare. “The Ways We Pay Attention.” New Literary History, vol. 56, no. 1, Winter 2025, Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 45-63.
[3] Oppen, George. New Collected Poems. Ed. Michael Davidson, New Directions Press, New York, 2001.
[4] Heidegger, Martin. “What is Metaphysics?” Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell, New York, Harper & Row, 1977, pg. 101.
[5] Dembo, L.S. Interview with George Oppen. “Objectivist Number,” Contemporary Literature, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring 1969.