无聊生活当真令人百无聊赖?

“无聊”算得上现代人口头儿的高频词。批评人士认为无聊是时间充裕、衣食无忧带来的负面影响。本文作者似乎不这么看，他认为“愉悦的无聊”具有一种活跃的气质，一种你从怠惰之暗走入灵感之光时所感受到的气质。

A friend and I are wandering through the lush gardens of a grand country home.[2] “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to live somewhere like this?” I ask, stopping to admire the view of the house over its lake. “Summer days on the lawn, grand parties, cocktails.” My friend mutters something about having a social conscience,[3] but I’m not listening. “Lazing[4] about,” I continue. “Wonderfully bored.” My friend’s face swivels[5] towards me. “Bored? How could you be bored if you had all that?” he exclaims.

I have always fancied being bored on a huge and stylish scale. I’m talking Great Gatsby boredom, with everyone lying around in white clothes and floppy hats, sipping long drinks with cooling names, and being utterly and divinely bored.[6]

There’s something exquisite about boredom. Like melancholy[7] and its darker cousin sadness, boredom is related to emptiness and meaninglessness, but in a perfectly enjoyable way. It’s like wandering through the National Gallery, being surrounded by all those great works of art, and deciding not to look at them because it’s a pleasure just walking from room to room enjoying the squeak of your soles on the polished floor.[8] Boredom is the no-signal sound on a blank television, the closed-down monotone of a radio in the middle of the night.[9] It’s an uninterrupted straight line.

Actually, my idea of boredom has little to do with wealthy surroundings. It’s about a certain mindset[10]. Perfect boredom is the enjoyment of the moment of stasis[11] that comes between slowing down and speeding up—like sitting at a traffic light for a particularly long time. It’s at the cusp of action, because however enjoyable it may be, boredom is really not a long-term aspiration.[12] It’s for an afternoon before a sociable evening. It marks that point in a holiday when you’ve shrugged off[13] all the concerns of work and home, explored the hotel and got used to the swimming pool, and everything has become totally familiar. “I’m bored” just pops into your mind one morning as you’re laying your towel over the sun lounger[14] before breakfast, and then you think “How lovely.” It’s about the stillness and familiarity of that precise moment before the anxiety about packing up and heading back to God-knows-what.

Like everyone, I’ve been bored in the way often linked with death, but that was mainly as a child, and as you get older you become more resilient[15] in dealing with it. As an adult, you can choose between luxuriating in your boredom or eliminating it by getting up and doing something.[16] The choice is yours.

As a child boredom is a bleak prospect[17]. It was my regular companion when my family stayed with my grandparents in Scotland for the summer holidays. Their house faced the sea, which meant that there was a rocky seashore to explore. But after five or six years of that it was beginning to pall[18]. There was a limit to how many times you could yell “I just saw something move in the water!” and run screaming from the water’s edge. There was also the fact that my sister was now grown up enough to find it demeaning to hang out with someone my age who wanted to play.[19] My parents and grandparents seemed delighted to sit and conduct endlessly dull conversations.

And so I would sit and think. I would sit at the top of the garden looking out over the roof of the house to the water beyond, and wonder what it would be like to live on a boat. And I would sit on the rocks on the seashore and watch the birds foraging[20] for food, and wonder what it would be like to fly. And I would sit in the sun lounger listening to the rain on the roof, and wonder what it would be like to be old enough to have holidays on your own, in proper hotels with swimming pools and waiters. And sometimes it was lovely just to be sitting and thinking like that for hours on end[21].

At other times my thoughts took more perplexing[22] turns. I would wonder if everything I was looking at wasn’t actually there, that it was just an illusion. Or what if everything was black but only I thought it was light and colourful? Or what if what I heard didn’t match what I thought I was seeing? These were not the sort of thoughts I felt able to own up to at the afternoon tea table, and so I ended up for quite some time believing that nothing could be trusted because my eyes were certainly being deceived.[23] I’m not sure why a ten year old boy was experiencing philosophical angst[24], but it certainly shows that I had an awful lot of time on my hands.

And that’s the point of boredom, isn’t it? Wasn’t Newton sitting underneath an apple tree staring into space, and Archimedes wallowing in the bath, when clarity struck?[25] In my own insignificant way, I think I have always understood that doing nothing is the key to getting somewhere. As a writer, it takes a while to convince others that you are working hard while appearing to be lying on the sofa staring at the ceiling, but once this is accomplished it can be very useful, especially if you are enjoying staring at the ceiling and hear, “I’m sorry, he can’t come to the phone at the moment, he’s working”—which suggests a genius on the cusp of a plot breakthrough rather than someone deciding whether to have poached or scrambled eggs for lunch.[26]

Living in a surfing suburb, I am often aware of groups of people of all ages who gather ostensibly to watch the surf.[27] The bigger and more dangerous the surf, the more people will gather and watch it. But there’s a limit to how long you can focus on huge waves crashing near the shore. Isn’t the reality that these people have completely zoned out[28] and are simply using the surf as an excuse to stare into space? If you asked them why they’re staring at the sea they’d come up with a host of answers, many of which might have the ring of truth.[29] Sure, the colour and drama of a roiling ocean is a sight to behold, but who’s going to admit that really, they’ve been loafing on the beach with an empty thought bubble hovering over their heads? [30]

Boredom in the workplace is something else, of course. Here every moment has hovering over it the question-mark of time passing.

This kind of boredom sucks the life from you. It has none of the hallmarks of the grand boredom that I’m after—the sort with a rousing soundtrack as you emerge from the darkness of sloth into the light of inspiration.[31] The sort that illuminates new questions: Why not go and live in another country? Why shouldn’t I write a novel? That sort of boredom is the equivalent of a long bath with French soap and frangipani flowers floating on the surface;[32] something so relaxing and pleasurable that you really don’t want it to end. And yet, when the bathwater has cooled and the flowers have gone mushy, you’re happy to lift your glowing self from the tub and move forward into the stream of life with renewed vigour.[33] Such is la vie d’ennui.

Vocabulary

1. vie: <法> 生活;ennui: <法> 无聊，倦怠。

2. lush:(植物)茂盛的;country home: 乡村住宅，多供人租来度假。

3. mutter: 轻声低语，咕哝;social conscience: 社会责任感。

4. laze: 偷懒，混日子。

5. swivel: 旋转。

6. Great Gatsby: “了不起的盖茨比”，亦为小说名，是美国20世纪著名作家Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald的长篇小说，以20世纪20年代纽约长岛为背景，讲述富翁盖茨比挥金如土，盼望鸳梦重温，但最终美梦幻灭的故事。本文中提及的场景为小说中描述的奢华酒宴。floppy hat: 软帽;long drink: 大杯饮料，尤指用大杯盛的啤酒;divinely: <口> 极度地。

7. melancholy: 忧郁。

8. squeak: 吱吱声;soles: 鞋跟。

9. closed-down:(广播电台或电视台)结束当日节目(之时)的;monotone: 单调的声音。

10. mindset: 心态，精神状态。

11. stasis: 停滞，静止。

12. cusp: 尖头，顶点，此处指即将到达顶点的状态;aspiration: 强烈的愿望。

13. shrug off: 摆脱。

14. sun lounger: 日光躺椅。

15. resilient: 适应性强的。

16. luxuriate: 沉溺;eliminate: 消除。

17. bleak prospect: 暗淡的景象。

18. pall: (因过多或过久而)令人生厌。

19. demeaning: 屈尊的，自我贬低的;hang out: 厮混，闲逛。

20. forage: 搜寻(食物)。

21. on end: 连续地。

22. perplexing: 令人困惑的。

23. own up to: 坦白承认，此处指“解释明白”;deceive: 欺骗。

24. angst:(尤指对时世的)忧虑。

25. Newton: 牛顿(1642—1727)，英国数学家、物理学家;Archimedes: 阿基米德(287?—212BC)，古希腊数学家、物理学家和发明家，相传于洗澡时发现阿基米德原理;wallow: 原指动物在泥水中打滚，此处指泡澡;clarity: 清晰，明晰，此处指灵感。

26. plot breakthrough: 情节的突破;poached or scrambled eggs: 荷包蛋还是炒鸡蛋。

27. surfing suburb: 冲浪;ostensibly: 表面上;surf: 拍岸浪。

28. zone out: 走神。

29. come up with: 想出，提出;a host of: 许多，一群;have a ring of truth: 似乎是真实的。

30. 的确，大海波涛滚滚，它的色彩与戏剧性都值得一看，但谁又会承认，自己在海边游荡之时，脑子里也充斥着空虚的思想泡沫?

31. 这种无聊不具备我所追求的“愉悦的无聊”之特质。“愉悦的无聊”具有一种活跃的气质，那种你从怠惰之暗走入灵感之光时所感受到的气质。

32. equivalent: 等同物;frangipani flower: 鸡蛋花。

33. mushy: 糊状的;glowing: 容光焕发的;tub: 浴盆。