They call it the Bore Track, a long stretch of road in the Strzelecki Desert of South Australia. It isn’t called that for the mental state it conjures, says Peter Toohey, but rather for the holes dug in nearby gas fields. Still Toohey defies any driver to experience its repetitive landscape without becoming seriously bored—road trips, along with gardening and long Easter services, are among his bêtes noires of boredom. “I’ve been bored for very large tracts of my life,” admits the Australian-born scholar, now on a new continent and a professor of classics at the University of Calgary.
Toohey’s Boredom: A Lively History (Yale University Press) lives up to its name. While something of a ramble, readers who are willing to meander from science to literature to art and other realms will find themselves engaged. For example, in Lo Spagna’s “The Agony in the Garden,” Toohey sees the “boredom of surfeit” in the disciples who foreground Jesus in the early 16th-century painting. “The brilliant insight of Lo Spagna was to add this boredom to the usual depiction of the sleepy Apostles in Gethsemane,” he writes. Just look at their postures. The common stances of boredom—elbows supported, heads cupped in hands, drooping necks, and thousand-yard stares, are a recurrent theme in the book. Consider the exiled Odysseus in an 1883 painting by Arnold Böcklin. The Greek hero stands hunched in shadow staring out to sea and not the least tempted by a half-naked Calypso beckoning from a cliff. Odysseus suspected, Toohey writes, that “an eternity of sex, even with an immortal goddess, would become pretty predictable.”
Along with its innate postures, boredom is an innate, adaptive emotion, suggests the author. Like the disgust that pushes us away from rotten food before it can harm, boredom may act like an early warning system, he muses, deflecting us from situations that may worsen. Toohey is speaking here of what he terms “simple boredom,” not your ennuis, your grand existential funks. “Existential boredom is a hotchpotch of a category,” he writes, “and one whose basis is more intellectual than experiential.” The author intends, he says, to give simple boredom equal billing.
What about the boredom prone? We all have the capacity for boredom, but for most of us it is transient and short-lived. Linking boredom to imbalances in the neurotransmitter dopamine, Toohey suggests that particularly wonky dopamine receptors may lead the chronically bored to seek ever-more-stimulating thrills. James M. Cain’s 1934 novel of adultery and murder, The Postman Always Rings Twice, is unpacked by Toohey as one of the best accounts of “this mix of risk-taking, sensation seeking, and chronic boredom.”
The persistently bored may also seek the oblivion of drink. Toohey remarks on “Stan,” an academic he knew who was an acclaimed specialist in medieval hydraulics, but “bored to tears.” “Being a polite fellow with a taste for tenure,” Stan kept on writing about medieval hydraulics. The last time Toohey saw him, the medievalist was “sweeping out of a bar and taking three tables with him.” Stan “was a terrible drunk, like many talented but chronically bored academics.”
Sometimes we have little choice about situational boredom. Covering boredom and confinement, Toohey describes how prisoners may create make-believe versions of dromomania or pathological tourism. Incarcerated for 20 years, the Nazi architect Albert Speer carefully plotted entire worldwide routes in the distances he was allowed to pace. Continuing on confinement, Toohey disputes Erich Fromm’s assertion that “man is the only animal that can be bored.” Beyond the commonplace of pets that exhibit boredom, consider the extreme case of a 30-year-old chimp in a Swedish zoo that each day piled stones in a corner of his island enclosure, then lobbed them at visitors once the zoo opened. That behavior, Toohey notes, revealed both boredom and planning. Yet “animals aren’t ‘allowed’ boredom because of its purportedly cerebral nature.” That’s another case of confusing simple boredom with the more highfalutin existential variety, Toohey says.
When the author moves on to upmarket kinds of boredom, he begins with acedia, the classical name for the Christian existential boredom that Evagrius, an ancient author, describes as whipping through the ascetic communities of the Desert Fathers. What may have been simple boredom at heart was over-intellectualized by the early Christians. Acedia, he says, represents the starting point for the Western concept of existential boredom. In subsequent centuries, he writes, calling boredom by other “over-dignified names” has “simply become self-important.”
How Many Languages Do We Need? The book title alone is geared to startle. Who are Victor Ginsburgh and Shlomo Weber to ask? And is “need” even a word that should apply to languages? In truth, How Many Languages Do We Need? The Economics of Linguistic Diversity (Princeton University Press) asks a far narrower question than its title implies. The study does note a current estimate of the world’s extant languages, 6,909, according to the 2009 edition of Ethnologue. But their survival or demise is not the topic for the book’s two economist authors, Ginsburgh, at the Free University of Brussels, and Weber, at Southern Methodist University and the New Economic School in Moscow. Instead, they are interested in multilingualism and the policy choices societies make that may disenfranchise speakers of non-core languages. “Economists are two-handed,” they write. “While one hand supports the virtues of linguistic diversity, the other hand would discreetly point out that they do not come for free.”
One caution. Having a Romance language or two, or a smattering of German or Chinese, does not help to speak the lingua of economics. The text has a generous portion of equations and tables, but the former are usually somehow translated and the latter usually clear. The authors also outline a “piecemeal reading” that skims the technical bits.
With an eye toward linguistic, genetic, and cultural “distances,” the authors focus on how language figures in such realms as trade, migration, and literary translation. They even explore vote trading by linguistic blocs (Cypriots and Greeks, for example) in that cheesefest known as the Eurovision Song Contest. Their various models culminate in a case study of “Babylon in Brussels” or the European Union’s language problem. When the E.U. was just 15 members, the authors write, it was already spending the equivalent of 686 million euros annually on translation and interpretation. Now with 27 members and 23 official languages, that figure has risen significantly, with some estimates as high as 1.8 billion, even with a lot of informal ways officials minimize translation. Moving to an English-only approach would incur multilingual hurt feelings and disenfranchisement of 62.6 percent of E.U. citizens, they say, at least until Europe’s more English-savvy youth are the majority of bureaucrats. Besides, today native and other English speakers can already “free ride” in the bureaucracy.
Analyzing population counts, sensitivities, and other factors, the authors describe how they arrive at English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Polish, in that order, as their choice for new “core languages,” which they say will account for 75.7 percent of the E.U. public. Translating into other languages would be the responsibility of their given countries, with perhaps some compensation from Brussels. No aid to taste for Eurovision singers perhaps, but a help for E.U. expenditures.
