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By Root 6171 0

to keep off the direct smothering weight?) but I had also developed a new oddity. On business errands on La Salle Street, zooming or plunging in swift elevators, every time I felt a check in the electrical speed and the door was about to open, my heart spoke up. Entirely on its own. It exclaimed, “My Fate!” It seems I expected some woman to be standing there. “At last! You!” Becoming conscious of this hungry demeaning elevator phenomenon I tried to do the right thing and get back on a mature standard. I even attempted to be scientific. But all science can do for you is to affirm again that when something like this happens there must be a natural necessity for it. This being sensible got me nowhere. What was there to be so sensible about if, as I felt, I had waited many thousands of years for God to send my soul to this earth? Here I was supposed to capture a true and clear word before I returned, as my human day ended. I was afraid to go back empty-handed. Being sensible could do absolutely nothing to mitigate this fear of missing the boat. Anyone can see that.

Called to jury duty I grumbled at first that it was a waste of time. But then I became a happy eager juror. To leave the house in the morning like everybody else was bliss. Wearing a numbered steel badge I sat joyfully with hundreds of others in the jury pool, high up in the new county skyscraper, a citizen among fellow citizens. The glass walls, the russet and plum steel beams were very fine—the large sky, the ruled space, the faraway spools of storage tanks, the orange delicate distant filthy slums, the green of the river strapped by black bridges. Looking out from the jurors’ hall I began to have Ideas. I brought books and papers downtown (so it shouldn’t be a total loss). For the first time I read through the letters my colleague Pierre Thaxter had been sending me from California.

I am not a careful letter reader and Thaxter’s letters were very long. He composed and dictated them in his orange grove near Palo Alto where he sat thinking in a canvas officer’s chair. He wore a black carabiniere cloak, his feet were bare, he drank Pepsi-Cola, he had eight or ten children, he owed money to everyone, and he was a cultural statesman. Adoring women treated him like a man of genius, believed all that he told them, typed his manuscripts, gave birth to his kids, brought him Pepsi-Cola to drink. Reading his voluminous memoranda which dealt with the first number of The Ark (in the planning stage for three years, and the costs were staggering), I realized that he had been pressing me to complete a group of studies on “Great Bores of the Modern World.” He kept suggesting possible lines of approach. Certain types were obvious, of course—political, philosophical, ideological, educational, therapeutic bores—but there were others frequently overlooked, for instance innovative bores. I however had lost interest in the categories and came presently to care only for the general and theoretical aspect of the project.

I had a lively time in the vast jurors’ hall going over my boredom notes. I saw that I had stayed away from problems of definition. Good for me. I didn’t want to get mixed up with theological questions about accidia and tedium vitae. I found it necessary to say only that from the beginning mankind experienced states of boredom but that no one had ever approached the matter front and center as a subject in its own right. In modern times the question had been dealt with under the name of anomie or Alienation, as an effect of capitalist conditions of labor, as a result of leveling in Mass Society, as a consequence of the dwindling of religious faith or the gradual using up of charismatic or prophetic elements, or the neglect of Unconscious powers, or the increase of Rationalization in a technological society, or the growth of bureaucracy. It seemed to me, however, that one might begin with this belief of the modern world—either you burn or you rot. This I connected with the finding of old Binet the psychologist that hysterical people had fifty times the energy, the endurance,