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Easiest of all perhaps - who knows? - when
it has never been ours. 12. A Knock Against a Wall At times the soul, like the mind, draws a blank. It doesn't rise to the occasion it has always taken in the first attack. What is left in its fingers? A hollow where there ought to be a hand. It blinks quizzically, feeling nothing, hardly thinking. It looks again: nothing. A slight ache opens at the back of the mind; not far back, just beyond reaching. That itch of frustration where there used to be merriment: the nagging instauration of boredom. Listening for the thousandth time to a piece of music you once loved passionately: the excitement fades, you can predict every note, every harmony, every pause before it happens. 
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You have to
put it away for at least ten years, "wound it with time as with a
blunt instrument, until, once again, it bleeds." Boredom can stand in the way of beauty like a curtain, or like a sentinel; boredom can surround beauty like a frame. Boredom is a withdrawal of awareness, an attempt to find what isn't there, a failure, even refusal, to see what is: beauty stands waiting for boredom to wake up. (Bore-dom: I will, when you, Beauty, stop lying to me.) Boredom has its own pride: to me, nothing is beautiful. Boredom is a revelation of what the world hides beneath its shimmering promises: vacuous, mindless, mechanical, without point, a game of chance in a baroque casino. I see through your lips to the back of your skull. Boredom can be a way of dominating and controlling our frustration by embracing it. "I  |
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