Word: boredoms
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When that happens once or twice, it may be interesting, but after that, boredom...
Contradictory Truth. In the three earlier books, time stood still as Novelist Durrell sought to prove how any single event can be variously interpreted by different participants. In Justine, Purse-warden's suicide is attributed to acedia, or boredom with life; Balthazar suggests that the suicide was caused by his failure as an artist; in Mountolive, the motive becomes purely political; and now in Clea, it seems established that Pursewarden took his life in an ironic expiation of his incestuous love for his blind sister. Durrell's point: "Truth is what most contradicts itself...
...families by phone (most frequent request: bring laundry to the base), often find, as one officer says, that alert duty is usually the time that "your furnace at home goes out or the dog gets lost, or your wife gets moody on the phone." There is no time for boredom. Some sit in seclusion in locked-door study rooms, poring over target data (they never discuss targets with other crews; no crew knows the target of another). And all the time they wait for the horn. There is no itchy tension: their sharp reflexes have been honed by intense training...
Sadistic & Sick. Less clear and distinctly alien is the rationale for Nunne's sadistic murders, all of which occur discreetly offstage. Novelist Wilson's argument is that crime is a thirst for freedom, a chance to wrest a heroic identity from a world of regimented boredom and blurring mediocrity. In a sick society, the superman becomes a monster. A trip to the morgue finally opens Gerard's eyes to the monstrosity of Nunne, but not before the reader has suffered much quasi-Nietzschean chatter to the effect that "if a man could kill all his illusions...
...person or class is seldom creative, while leisure, even wasteful leisure, may end creatively." ¶ "Goethe owed much to his not being afraid of uttering commonplaces, and of being prolix and even dull ... Is ponderosity, then, something that impresses and inspires respect even when we carry away from it boredom and confusion?" ¶ "Athens too had its folks who had gramophones beside them, or jazz, or bridge to keep talk away. But in our time the dread of conversation has invaded classes higher than in Athens." ¶"To me it seems puerile to regard anything as ugly except...