Word: boredoms
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Death has no sting. It is the custom for an Enu to go out of sight to die-conveniently underground. From sheer boredom the inhabitants invent their wars, like board games. They do not even care if they win. Winning can be a problem. "Win a war and you have to make the enemy do your will," the Enu Defense Minister complains. "What will? We have no will. We even lack a will to live. We no longer need...
...world's climates and locales. From the chatter and odor of the Howrah station in Calcutta to the more sympatico setting of Costa Rica, Theroux finds himself obsessed with a world beyond the borders of affluence and gratuitous soul-searchings. His proposition is pretty much a remedy for boredom--his own, and that of us who bother to take the train-rides with him. For what Paul Theroux writes about is little more than what Paul Theroux sees. His style unobjectionable and offhand. Theroux finds little more to say than what is most obvious. And that in itself...
...stares straight at one's bookshelves. It is not the judgmental possibility that is frightening: the fact that one's sense of discrimination is exposed by his books. Indeed, most people would much prefer to see the guest first scan, then peer and turn away in boredom or disapproval. Alas, too often the eyes, dark with calculation, shift from title to title as from girl to girl in an overheated dance hall. Nor is that the worst. It is when those eyes stop moving that the heart too stops. The guest's body twitches; his hand floats...
...from his earliest one-acter, The Room (1957), to his latest drama, Betrayal-begins on a note of nervous apprehension. What proceeds after that is not the unfolding of a plot but the revelation of a state of being, a kind of black comic hell consisting of menace, panic, boredom and absurdist non sequiturs. His characters are caught in seemingly desperate and openly despairing situations that cannot be ameliorated and that may end in psychological or physical violence...
...FURTHER the essays wander into this sort of nihilistic agonizing, the weaker they become. One pitfall of utter pessimism is that, properly approached, it appears all-encompassing--everything connects, from genocide to boredom to Samuel Beckett's Endgame and Godot. Cantor's penchant for citing his predecessors aggravates the problem. He quotes Norman O. Brown on Hegel in reference to Beckett's plays to bolster his own assertion, not explained further, that "time is negativity"; he quotes Frederic Jameson on Ernst Block on Marxism. Two comments on Beckett are separated by the sentence, "Krazy Kat hopes that someday Ignatz Mouse...