In an interview that the composer/saxophonist John Zorn gave to Terry Gross on NPR on the occasion of his 60th birthday, she asked him about vacations - does he take them? wouldn't he like a week at the beach? He said something to the effect that a vacation at the beach would drive him crazy. I understand. There's a pall of boredom that settles like mist over the water or humidity over the land.
I'm at the beach. Yes, we go swimming in the Mediterranean once a day (when the waves aren't slamming hapless swimmers around), and I'm reading a lot - but I'm also composing. Beach culture isn't stimulating on a surface level, but perhaps it's the boredom that makes room for the ideas. Today, I finished the second pencil draft of a composition for soprano and percussion with text by the marvelous poet Albert Goldbarth. I asked him to write a text that might use imagery from Kansas. Even though I haven't lived there for 25 years, the roots of the space, sky, and land is very much with me. It's one reason I actually like the sea - it's an expanse not unlike the prairie. Open, flat-ish, and covered by a bowl of blue sky (to rip off imagery from Laura Ingalls Wilder, also a prairie-bred person). Interestingly, Goldbarth makes use of the wind in his poem, and as I set this text the wind was blowing furiously from Northern Africa for 4 days running.
Once, when passing through Kansas a few years back I met a tough, widowed woman farmer, aged 77, who disdainfully said something to the effect that no grown man should admit that he's bored. Fortunately I wasn't the topic of the conversation.
But.
Boredom is a fact of life. The beach is boring, but maybe boredom serves a purpose, freeing the brain from intensive thoughts and ideas and frees up space for idle dreams and perhaps revelations. Perhaps boredom is an occasional blessing.
As Kurt Vonnegut writes the transcript of a commencement address published in "Palm Sunday:"
As for boredom: Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher, . . . had this to say: 'Against boredom, even the gods contend in vain.' We are supposed to be bored. It is part of life. Learn to put up with it, or you will not be what I have declared the members of this graduating class to be: mature women and men.