Ennui need not be dull

'YOUR job as an author," a friend once told me, "is to be bored for your readers."

Illustration: Tom Jellett

'YOUR job as an author," a friend once told me, "is to be bored for your readers."

The author has to suck up the tedium of the writing process and, at the end of it, produce something interesting. In this, boredom is no simple evil or vice. It can be a tolerable part of a productive life or a useful warning: leave now or prepare to squander hours. Boredom can be helpful.

This idea is at the heart of Boredom: A Lively History by classicist Peter Toohey, an Australian-born scholar at the University of Calgary in Canada.

Toohey's thesis is a bold though straightforward one: boredom is a universal, natural and sometimes valuable human emotion. He describes it as "a social emotion of mild disgust produced by a temporarily unavoidable and predictable circumstance".

Throughout history, scholars have given boredom many names: ennui, melancholy, acedia. It has been theologised as a demonic attack or a sin, and romanticised as poetic alienation. But in many such cases, all that was really being felt was the listlessness of monotony, solitude, laziness or confinement: simple boredom, in other words. The desert monks of the 3rd century AD facing the "noontide demon" weren't struggling with Satan. Their problem was too much silence and sand. They conflated psychological warning signs with religious battle.

Toohey is clearly impatient with this tradition and its modern versions, philosophical discussions of existential boredom. He sees this as a gussied-up version of simple boredom or a catch-all phrase for quite different moods or conditions such as loneliness and depression. It is an academic concept, not a natural human emotion.

For Toohey this is important because over-complicated theories of boredom can blind us to more obvious symptoms. We are bored not necessarily because we're philosophically alienated by modernity but because, for example, we are stuck in sedentary, blinkered lives. And this is likelier to promote depression and aggression than the lack or otherwise of existential authenticity.

In a persuasive chapter informed by animal and human psychology, Toohey demonstrates how pets and prisoners are driven mad by incarceration. Here boredom is simply the first symptom of a more serious condition. Cockatoos in cages rip out their feathers; prison inmates turn to drugs, violence, self-harm. Boredom is a sign that we need to change our circumstances or habits. We need precisely what captives lack: variety, exercise and good company.

In this, boredom is partly a question of value, a question implicit in Toohey's diagnoses and prescriptions. We put up with boredom when it's part of something worthwhile, such as writing a book. We calculate that the gains -- a clearer idea of a common problem, professional recognition, royalties -- will outweigh the brief loss of our psychological equilibrium.

When it comes to the remedies for boredom, exercise is valuable partly because it contributes to mental health. By promoting the growth of new neural cells, it revives memory, enhances cognition, alleviates depression. Simple boredom, in this light, is not a disease to be cured. Like the dull backache of deskwork, it prompts us to rethink the value of crucial choices and dumb habits.

However, questions of value are best asked alongside some vision of the good life. This is how we evaluate what's healthy or unhealthy, enriching or depleting, liberating or distracting. Toohey touches on this with his discussion of happiness but passes over Aristotle's conception a bit too hastily.

By happiness, Aristotle did not simply mean simple pleasure or joy but eudemonia: human flourishing. This is why the philosopher did not think animals were happy: not because they couldn't feel simple pleasure but because they were incapable of the intellectual and moral pursuits unique to humanity. Toohey recommends Aristotle's thoughts on leisure, but these are less convincing when discussed in isolation from eudemonia, with its potential to illuminate the role of boredom in a good life.

But this does not tarnish Toohey's impressive achievement: he makes boredom sexy. His crisp, conversational prose is untainted by jargon or pretence. His arguments display impressive erudition: history, philosophy, psychology, neuroscience and aesthetics all get a guernsey. If good writing requires authorial boredom, Toohey was undoubtedly tortured by tedium while writing this sharp, humane and funny book.

Damon Young is a Melbourne-based philosopher and writer. His most recent book is Distraction.