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The word 'boring' can designate just as well a person who bores others as someone who bores himself. Those who bore others are the plebeians . . . the endless train of humanity in general; those who bore themselves are the chosen ones, the nobility. How remarkable it is that those . . . who bore themselves entertain others.
-Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
This epigraph belongs to a wry essay that concludes with a recommendation for the bored to live intensively by cultivating arbitrariness: "The more consistently a person knows how to sustain his arbitrariness, the more amusing the combinations become. . . . The eye with which one sees actuality must be changed continually" (299). Kierkegaard's suggestion is of value here for the cultivation of arbitrariness as a response to boredom and the boring is everywhere in Virginia Woolf's writing: most of her novels begin with bids to alleviate character ennui, and she often labors to demonstrate how things presumed banal-marked walls, snails-might in fact be interesting. Adam Phillips claims that boredom is always accompanied by "that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire" (71). And indeed, Woolf's boredom fed her creative, authorial longings, which were notably exacerbated by the tedium of enforced bed rest following her many illnesses. Perhaps as a consequence, frequently bored but persistent artists form a motif in her work, as best represented by the melancholic Orlando, who writes "The Oak Tree" for centuries. For Woolf, as for Orlando, the artistic end product is less consequential than the endless fascinations of the creative process.
Boredom has long been presumed a conduit to the visionary, a supposition well evinced by Aristotle's interrelation of melancholy and genius, and emergent in Plato's Phaedrus: "absolute ennui is in itself nothing but life laid bare when it contemplates itself with lucidity" (qtd. in Kuhn 339). In Experience without Qualities: Modernity and Boredom, Elizabeth Goodstein observes that philosophers regularly maintain that melancholy is the common ground of the human condition while eliding the fact that it is a concept both privileged and historically constituted. Although regularly and erroneously used interchangeably with "boredom," "melancholy" signals a "genuine reflection upon the meaning of human existence [that] is the province of the leisured [and presumably well-educated] few"...