#24: I got it
Dear Readers:
You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the twenty-fourth one.
There should be two separate words for Boredom. The kind of boredom I feel when I’m reading my students’ essays, or even when I know I have to start reading them soon, is a kind of panic. “A panic boredom, to the point of distress,” as Roland Barthes puts it. Like I want to quit my job so that I don’t have to read them and change my name just to be on the safe side so that if they try to find me to request at least some written feedback if not a grade, they won’t be able to.
But when I start reading my students’ essays and they’re actually kind of interesting, another type of boredom sets in. Resistance-boredom rather than panic-boredom. I don’t want to be interested by them. Panic-boredom chooses me, but I seem to be choosing resistance-boredom. What makes me do that? I begin a student essay, it’s pretty interesting and good, and so rather than continue reading it, I go to nytimes.com and see if there’s any news, and if there isn’t, rather than returning to the essay, I go to nymag.com and see if there’s anything to buy. Why?
Horror. I think both boredoms are about fear. Real fear of being interested. Looking after Bea always includes resistance-boredom. I try so many things to be bored when I’m with her. I turn on the radio, try to read a magazine, call someone, think think think as much as I can.
She has been making me read the same book over and over again: I Got It! by David Wiesner. The only words in the whole book are “I got it!” on two of the pages.
A boy joins a baseball game of kids he doesn’t know. The first batter hits the ball into the outfield, and the boy yells, “I got it!” but he falls and the ball slips out of his glove. Bea’s lip begins to tremble. The next several pages show the boy trying to get the ball and failing in all these imaginative ways. Bea makes a terrible-to-see frown and tears fall from her eyes. She moans. This isn’t the way she normally cries. It is a rich, almost indulgent, response to pathos. I know it well.
At the end of the book, the boy really does get the ball. “I got it!” Bea stops crying. She closes the book and holds it up to me expectantly. We go through the whole emotional process again. Again, again, again, pressing hard on the bruise. She hasn’t learned yet how scary it is to be interested.
Glory. Boredom is so seductive. It’s a veil. No—it’s a mask, an N95. To not be bored would be to be caught in a loop reading I Got It and crying all day long, naked against the universe of your emotions. I was looking through Motherhood by Sheila Heti the other day to see if it was still good. I think I’m going to write about this next month—I keep noticing that recent novels I found brilliant when I first read them seem not good at all on further appraisal. But Motherhood was a thousand times better than I remembered it. As I paged through it, it throbbed. I wanted to unread it, unknow about it. The way Heti writes about being a woman, about the choice that motherhood is, terrifies me. I’m afraid to pick it up again so that I can describe to you how good it is.
Here I am—back in my apartment that is filled with books. The lonely fill up their lives with books. I don’t live in nature. I don’t live in culture. I don’t live in my relationships. I live in books. What good can all the books of the world be, penned by the loneliest men who ever lived?
There. There’s one part I loved. My eyes are filled with tears from typing that out. I got it.
Sincerely,
Lucy