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By Root 707 0

not only with things, but with myself. I know that these matters are difficult to explain; I will not go further than to suggest my meaning by use of a metaphor. During the days following my decision to give up painting, I closely resembled, in relation to myself, some individual, for various reasons intolerable, who is found by a traveler in his own railroad car at the beginning of a long journey. The car is of the old-fashioned kind, without any communication with the other coaches; the train is not going to stop until the end of the journey; and so the traveler is forced to remain with his hateful companion without hope of escape. In reality, and leaving metaphor aside, boredom had thoroughly corroded my life during those years, down below the surface of my job as a painter, leaving nothing unimpaired; so that once I had given up painting I felt I had been transformed, without noticing it, into a kind of shapeless, truncated fragment. And the main feature of my boredom was the practical impossibility of remaining in my own company—I myself being, moreover, the only person in the world whom I could not get rid of in any possible way.

And so at that time my life was dominated by a feeling of extraordinary impatience. Nothing that I did pleased me or seemed worth doing; furthermore, I was unable to imagine anything that could please me, or that could occupy me in any lasting manner. I was constantly going in and out of my studio on any sort of futile pretext—pretexts which I invented for myself with the sole object of not remaining there: to buy cigarettes I didn’t need, to have a cup of coffee I didn’t want, to acquire a newspaper that didn’t interest me, to visit an exhibition of pictures about which I hadn’t the slightest curiosity, and so on. I felt, moreover, that these occupations were nothing more than crazy disguises of boredom itself, so much so that sometimes I did not complete the errands I undertook. Instead of buying a newspaper or drinking coffee or visiting an exhibition, after taking a few steps I would return to the studio which I had left in such a hurry only a few minutes before. Back in the studio boredom, of course, awaited me and the whole process would begin over again.

I would take down a book—for I had a small library and have always been fond of reading—but very soon I would let it drop: novels, essays, poetry, drama, the whole literature of the world—there was not one single page that succeeded in holding my attention. In any case, why should it? Words are symbols of objects, and with objects I had no relationship at all in moments of boredom. So I would drop my book, or perhaps in an impulse of rage fling it into a corner, and turn to music. I had an extremely good record player, a present from my mother, as well as about a hundred records. Who was it who said that music always acts in some kind of way, that is, makes itself listened to forcibly, so to speak, by even the most distracted person? The man who said that was incorrect. My ears refused not merely to listen but even to hear. Besides, when it came to the point of choosing a record, I was paralyzed by this thought: what sort of music is it that can be listened to in these moments of boredom? And so I would close the record player, throw myself down on the divan and start thinking of what I could do.

What struck me above all was that I did not want to do simply anything, although I desired eagerly to do something. Anything I might wish to do presented itself to me like a Siamese twin joined inseparably to some opposite thing which I equally did not wish to do. Thus I felt that I did not want to see people nor yet to be alone; that I did not want to stay at home nor yet to go out; that I did not want to travel nor yet to go on living in Rome; that I did not want to paint nor yet not to paint; that I did not want to stay awake nor yet to go to sleep; that I did not want to make love nor yet not to do so; and so on. When I say “I felt” I ought rather to say that I was filled with repugnance, with disgust, with horror.

I used to ask myself,