As prone as I am to tedium, it’s odd that until now I’ve never seriously thought about just what it is. Today my soul is in that state of limbo where neither life nor anything else really appeals, and I’ve decided, since I’ve never done it before, to analyse tedium through my impressionistic thoughts, even though whatever analysis I dream up will naturally be somewhat factitious.

I don’t know if tedium is merely the waking equivalent of a vagrant’s drowsy stupor, or if it is something more noble. In my own experience, tedium occurs frequently but unpredictably, without following a set pattern. I can go an entire listless Sunday without tedium, or I can suddenly experience it, like a cloud overhead, in the middle of concentrated labour. As far as I can tell, it isn’t related to my state of health (or lack thereof), nor does it result from causes residing in my visible, tangible self.

To say that it’s a metaphysical anxiety in disguise, that it’s an acute disillusion incognito, that it’s a voiceless poetry of the bored soul sitting at the window which looks out on to life – to say this or something similar can colour tedium, like a child who colours over the outlines of a figure and effaces them, but it’s no more to me than a din of words echoing in the cellar of the mind.

Tedium… To think without thinking, but with the weariness of thinking; to feel without feeling, but with the anxiety of feeling; to shun without shunning, but with the disgust that makes one shun – all of this is in tedium but is not tedium itself, being at best a paraphrase or translation of it. In terms of our immediate sensation, it’s as if the drawbridge had been raised over the moat of the soul’s castle, such that we can only gaze at the lands around the castle, without ever being able to set foot on them. There’s something in us that isolates us from ourselves, and the separating element is as stagnant as we are, a ditch of filthy water around our self-alienation.

Tedium… To suffer without suffering, to want without desire, to think without reason… It’s like being possessed by a negative demon, like being bewitched by nothing at all. Wizards and witches, by making images of us and subjecting them to torments, can supposedly cause those torments to be reflected in us through an astral transference. Transposing this image, I would say that my tedium is like the fiendish reflection of an elfin demon’s sorceries, applied not to my image but to its shadow. It’s on my internal shadow, on the outside of my inner soul, that papers are pasted or needles are poked. I’m like the man that sold his shadow,* or, rather, like the shadow that was sold.

Tedium… I work hard. I fulfil what the moralists of action would say is my social duty. I fulfil that duty, or fate, without too much effort and without gross incompetence. But sometimes right in the middle of my work, or in the middle of the rest which, according to the same moralists, I deserve and ought to enjoy, my soul overflows with a bitter inertia, and I’m tired, not of working or of resting, but of me. Why of me, if I wasn’t thinking about myself? Of what other thing, if I wasn’t thinking about anything? The mystery of the universe that descends on my bookkeeping or on my repose? The universal sorrow of living which is suddenly particularized in my soul-turned-medium? Why so ennoble someone whose identity isn’t even certain? It’s a sensation of emptiness, a hunger without appetite, as noble as the sensations that come to our physical brain and stomach when we smoke too much or suffer from indigestion.

Tedium… Perhaps, deep down, it is the soul’s dissatisfaction because we didn’t give it a belief, the disappointment of the sad child (who we are on the inside) because we didn’t buy it the divine toy. Perhaps it is the insecurity of one who needs a guiding hand and who doesn’t feel, on the black path of profound sensation, anything more than the soundless night of not being able to think, the empty road of not being able to feel…

Tedium… Those who have Gods don’t have tedium. Tedium is the lack of a mythology. For people without beliefs, even doubt is impossible, even their scepticism will lack the strength to question. Yes, tedium is the loss of the soul’s capacity for self-delusion; it is the mind’s lack of the non-existent ladder by which it might firmly ascend to truth.