Elisa Veini stumbles across the virtues of boredom at a little guesthouse in Valbona, Albania, owned by Catherine Bohne:
Catherine and other local people who campaign for the conservation of nature and culture in the region, could easily add to their programme a third value to campaign for: doing actively nothing, or boredom. Later on, she sends me a quote from Joseph Brodsky’s lecture “Listening to Boredom”:
When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it: submerge, hit bottom (…) boredom is your window on time, your window on time’s infinity, which is to say your insignificance in it, the most valuable lesson in your life (…) Boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is humility and precision.
It’s a lovely, rambling piece and reminds me there are other modes of existence than the one engulfing us now. Rereading it, this passage catches my eye:
As Catherine describes the place on her website, “Valbona is the perfect destination for those who are good at amusing themselves. If your ideal getting-away-from-it-all involves a lot of lying around and reading, splashing around and flipping rocks, getting to know people who seem to live in a completely different reality (or do they?), or hurling yourself at the nearest impossible peak, then Valbona is for you.” A bigger difference from NYC would seem hardly possible. She admits this willingly: “I must be one of my only contemporaries who knows what it’s like to have months and months when you wake up in the morning and think ‘Hm. What shall I do today?’”
It makes me think, “To abandon doing, achievement, to let the mind run free of the constraint of bludgeoning my fellows half to death; is it heaven or hell?”
