Tediousness

“ A man, who seemed sufficiently splenetic, commenced to grumble at the tediousness of conversation. “What! are there none but fools, who describe their own character and bring everything home to themselves?” ”

“ And certain hope of your fix'd faith and fast good-will,
Made me attempt this famous fact, most needful to fulfil:
To you I yield great thanks, to me redounds the gain,
Now home apace, and ring it out, that Tediousness is slain.
Say all at once, Tediousness is slain.
ACT V., SCAENA 6. SCIENCE, WIT. SCIENCE.
I hear and see the joyful news, wherein I take delight,
That Tediousness, our mortal foe, is overcome in fight:
I see the sign of victory, the sign of manliness:
The heap of happy haps: the joy that tongue cannot express.
Our [442] welcome fame from day to day for ever shall arise. ”

“ In the last chapter an illustration of tediousness was omitted, because it so happily exhibits the manner in which a stop may be put to a tedious discourse without incivility, that it deserves a chapter to itself. ”

“ Tediousness, again, annoyance and satiety, are only mixed up ingeniously among the various pleasures which are served up and administered in the course of a great entertainment, just as we give a dog an emetic by rubbing him all over with it, so that he may bring it to operate by licking it slowly off. ”

“ It has all the vitality of error and all the tediousness of an old friend. ”

“ Do not the numberless bodily disturbances due to stupidity, excitement, madness, rage, dullness, and a hundred other species of folly, temporary or continuous, trouble, weaken, distract, and even extinguish it? ”

“ But patience and discipline were necessary to enable one to get through life with decency and pleasure, and while I untangled the silk I should have time to reflect upon how comically ridiculous I had been to throw down and trample upon an inanimate thing that only my personal stupidity had caused to annoy me. ”

“ But, after all, I have found it a hard task and sore test of my courage for the last five weeks to go on daily bolting the egotism, selfishness, and sordid meanness of my sick world, and at night writing till one or two or three o’clock every imaginable kind of nonsense, with a heavy heart and an aching head—for means, ay, for means,—only to continue the same dull drudgery somewhat longer. ”

“ There is a significance about their very awfulness. One may fall before them, but they pass like a great express train, roaring, flashing, things deliberately and intently designed; but these dull failures which seem not the outgrowth of anyone's fierce longing or wilful passion, but of everyone's laziness and greediness and stupidity, how is one to face them? ”

“ The child with his sweet pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound, without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon, or a ginger-bread dog, individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue, which this day of continual petty madness has incurred. ”

“ Let him ask himself—Can they live and toil there without contracting a probably diseased habit of body; without contracting a certainly dull, weary, sordid habit of mind, which craves for any pleasure, however brutal, to escape from its own stupidity and emptiness? ”

“ If I yield to an impulse of which I know I shall be ashamed, is it not the act of a madman? And may not the act lead to a habit, and at length to a despised, perhaps feared and hated, old age, twisting at the ragged ends of a miserable life? ”

“ It’s partly the folly of my youth to care so much for those young fools over yonder,—so much like myself, or like what I used to be,—and dancing, and tennis, and wheeling, and flirting, and frivolity. ”

“ Ah, now I know that you are Teigue the Fool. You say that I am wise, and yet I say, there are no angels.
Fool I have seen plenty of angels.
Wise Man No, no, you have not.
Fool They are plenty if you but look about you. They are like the blades of grass.
Wise Man They are plenty as the blades of grass—I heard that phrase when I was but a child and was told folly.
Fool When one gets quiet. ”

“ Everywhere were gashes, chips, or rubbish; all that loneliness, idleness, or stupidity could suggest to the mind of a rich idiot, on the lookout for some new amusement, destruction and disfigurement being the only things that could come into the head of a creature too dull to be of any use himself in the world. ”

“ Ten times over I must essay the task, must lean down over the abyss. And each time the natural laziness which deters us from every difficult enterprise, every work of importance, has urged me to leave the thing alone, to drink my tea and to think merely of the worries of to-day and of my hopes for to-morrow, which let themselves be pondered over without effort or distress of mind. ”

“ I thought how vividly that old glutton illustrated the fools who, in their effort to gulp down the sensual pleasures of this world, choke the soul, and nothing but the clap-board of hard experience, well laid on, can dislodge the ham, and restore the equilibrium. ”

“ Upon this actual weakness of mind, and suicidal melancholy, combined with native humour and the biting irony into which his view of the world has sharpened it, is added the feigned form of insanity, the antic disposition wilfully put on, the dishevelled habiliments of person and conversation. ”

“ You feel, in a confused way, that to turn your strained attention to folly would temporarily refresh the blood, and make you lose from sight the end of the visit and the misery of parting for a fortnight. ”

“ Every one has surely felt, some time or other in life, the insufferable annoyance of having his thoughts and reflections interfered with, and broken in upon by the vulgar impertinence and egotism of some “bore,” who, mistaking your abstraction for attention and your despair for delight, inflicts upon you his whole life and adventures, when your own immediate destinies are perhaps vacillating in the scale. ”

“ THE VICE OF EXCESS.
Perpetual amusement-seeking: brings ennui, satiety, and disgust.—"All play and no work makes Jack a mere toy," is as true as that "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy." The constant pursuit of amusement makes life empty and frivolous. Rightly used recreation increases one's powers for serious pursuits. Pursued wrongly, pursued as the main concern of life, amusement makes all serious work seem stale and dull; and finally makes amusement itself dull and stale too. Ennui, loathing, disgust, and emptiness are the marks of the amusement-seeker the world over. ”

“ They have reached the stage when they are the victims of human pity—a lamentable condition. But those dense persons inhabiting the thickly populated region bordering on foolishness—those self-satisfied, uncomprehending egotists occupying the half-way house between wisdom and folly, known as stupidity—against such my wrath burns fiercely. ”

“ If you could only see what a miserable spectacle, what a fool exhibition, you make of yourself [Pg 107] on such occasions, when you go all to pieces and rave like a madman because you miss your train, or because you think some one insults you, when you step down from the throne of your reason and let the brute sit there and rule in your place, you would be so chagrined and mortified that you would leave nothing undone to rid yourself of your fault. ”

“ And no matter what may have happened, every evening brought with it such an irritating, strained, spicy expectation of adventures that every other life, after that in a house of ill-fame, would have seemed flat and humdrum to these lazy women of no will power. ”

“ In my original condition, in the body in which I was first introduced to life, I certainly had a great aversion to all troublesome employments, whether of business or amusement, being supposed by many persons to be then what as many considered me now—to wit, the laziest man in my state. ”

“ There is something, too, especially fatiguing in seeing every one around you busy but yourself, while the novelty, the bustle, and the noise, prevents your attention from being riveted by conversation or lost in reverie: you soon become equally restless and weary. ”

“ Every hour that I live, pent in by intolerable forms and immeasurable dulness, the maddening temper gains on me! Nay, I have had to rush out at night and swear a dozen round oaths before I could compose myself to sit down to the endless supper. ”

“ The displayers of them, in their impatient haste to catch the pennies of the public, or admiration, or whatever they might be desiring, were presenting, raw, confused and unimagined, their own unfelt and uncogitated experience, or, sometimes, an extension of their experience, in which, by an appalling logic, while they limned life as they would like to live it, they were led to the limits of unreason and egoistic folly. ”

“ His habits of circumgyration, with sudden stops and starts,—his strange air of abstractedness, a sort of excogitative look, apparently puzzled to find something out,—odd way of talking to himself, as if he himself were some other person, saying, “what a noise the fellow makes,” “I think the fellow’s a fool,” and striking his face in apparent anger,—strange mode of mentioning names once familiar to him,—putting a question,—seeming to listen, and giving an answer quite foreign to it, are most striking, and such as no descriptive powers can enable another to conceive, without seeing him. ”

“ What a fool have I been to waste so much time, to spend my days in a study which yields no better fruit, and makes me the laughing stock of the world." Such are the cries of the irritability of genius, and such are often the causes. ”

“ We know it, each one for himself, that when we jibe or ridicule a good impulse in another, it is evidence of our weakness and incapacity to experience the same feeling ourselves, and it is the momentary hatred of envy that suggests a taunt or a mocking word on the firm resolution of our companion. ”

“ Thousands of young people who envy such of their mates as are getting on faster than they are keep on wasting their precious evenings and their half-holidays, saying nothing but the most frivolous, frothy, senseless things—things which do not rise to the level of humor, but the foolish, silly talk which demoralizes one's ambition, lowers one's ideals and all the standards of life, because it begets habits of superficial and senseless thinking. ”

“ The mere fact of your having breathed an atmosphere in common with him has robbed you of those social excellences for which you were all so remarkable; you have become vain, tetchy, jealous, and morose. ”

“ Folly, melancholy, madness, are but one disease, Delirium is a common name to all. Alexander, Gordonius, Jason Pratensis, Savanarola, Guianerius, Montaltus, confound them as differing secundum magis et minus; so doth David, Psal. xxxvii. 5. “I said unto the fools, deal not so madly,” and 'twas an old Stoical paradox, omnes stultos insanire, [179] all fools are mad, though some madder than others. And who is not a fool, who is free from melancholy? Who is not touched more or less in habit or disposition? ”

“ II. We sometimes behold life in idiots, in whom there is not only an absence of the stimuli of the understanding and passions, but frequently, from the weakness of their bodies, a deficiency of the loco-motive powers. Here an inordinate appetite for food, or venereal pleasures, or a constant habit of laughing, or talking, or playing with their hands and feet, supply the place of the stimulating operations of the mind, and of general bodily exercise. Of the inordinate force of the venereal appetite in idiots we have many proofs. ”

“ I have still some vague recollection of an endeavour I made to trace the character of the insanity in every case to some early trait of the individual in childhood, when, overcome by passion or overbalanced by excitement, the faculties run wild into all those excesses which in after years develop eccentricities of character, and in some weaker temperaments aberrations of intellect. ”

“ His wisdom was that of the self-deceived fool
Who quits the clear fount for the foul, stagnant pool,
Who puts out his eyes lest the light he descry,
Then shouts 'mid the gloom "how clear-sighted am I!" ”

“ All these disadvantages increase the sullenness of the timid, who are overcome by the sense of their own physical weakness, which they know has its origin in a condition of mind that they lack the power either to change or to abolish. ”

“ Even impertinence will not save our essays upon ourselves from being tedious—nor will shamelessness in the flaunting of our vices. Something else is required than a mere wish to strip ourselves bare; something else than a mere desire to call attention to ourselves. ”

“ We are torn in pieces by our passions, as so many wild horses, one in disposition, another in habit; one is melancholy, another mad; [395] and which of us all seeks for help, doth acknowledge his error, or knows he is sick? As that stupid fellow put out the candle because the biting fleas should not find him; he shrouds himself in an unknown habit, borrowed titles, because nobody should discern him. ”

“ Among those foolish pursuers of pleasure they reckon all that delight in hunting, in fowling, or gaming, of whose madness they have only heard, for they have no such things among them. But they have asked us, 'What sort of pleasure is it that men can find in throwing the dice?' (for if there were any pleasure in it, they think the doing it so often should give one a surfeit of it) ”

“ But looking only at my career since the change, when I think of the boredom I have endured, the folly I have permitted to waste my valuable time—when I recall the forbearance I have shown in sparing impudent and lazy incompetence where I might, yes, ought to have used the ax—when I think of my good-natured tolerance in face of extremest daily provocation, year after year, I marvel at myself and feel how unjust, how characteristically the verdict of little shallow men, is the attack on me as cold and unsympathetic. ”

“ What strides he is constantly taking to the ridiculous, and not always from the sublime! How strong! how weak! How wise! how foolish! Consistent only in folly, and steady in the purpose of being foolish. ”