What A Beautiful Necklace

By Author: kinhomchan
Total Articles: 66
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A friend and I are wandering through the lush gardens of a grand country home. "Wouldn't it be wonderful to live somewhere like this?" I ask, stopping to admire the view of the house over its lake. "Summer days on the lawn, grand parties, cocktails." My friend mutters something about having a social conscience,' but I'm not listening. "Lazing" about," I continue. "Wonderfully bored." My friend's face swivels towards me. "Bored? How could you be bored if you had all that?" he exclaims. I have always fancied being bored on a huge and stylish scale. I'm talking Great Gatsby boredom, with everyone lying around in white clothes and floppy hats, sipping long drinks with cooling names, and being utterly and divinely bored. There's something exquisite about boredom. Like melancholy and its darker cousin sadness, boredom is related to emptiness and meaninglessness, but in a perfectly enjoyable way. It's like wandering through the National Gallery, being surrounded by all those great works of art, and deciding not to look at them because it's a pleasure just walking from room to room enjoying the squeak of your soles on the polished floor.8 ...
... Boredom is the no-signal sound on a blank television, the closed-down monotone of a radio in the middle of the night.9 It's an uninterrupted straight line. Actually, my idea of boredom has little to do with wealthy surroundings. It's about a certain mindset10. Perfect boredom is the enjoyment of the moment of stasis" that comes between slowing down and speeding up—like sitting at a traffic light for a particularly long time. It's at the cusp of action, because however enjoyable it may be, boredom is really not a long-term aspiration. It's for an afternoon before a sociable evening. It marks that point in a holiday when you've shrugged off" all the concerns of work and home, explored the hotel and got used to the swimming pool, and everything has become totally familiar. "I'm bored" just pops into your mind one morning as you're laying your towel over the sun lounger before breakfast, and then you think "How lovely." It's about the stillness and familiarity of that precise moment before the anxiety about packing up and heading back to God-knows-what. Like everyone, I've been bored in the way often linked with death, but that was mainly as a child, and as you get older you become more resilient in dealing with it. As an adult, you can choose between luxuriating in your boredom or eliminating it by getting up and doing something.16 The choice is yours. As a child boredom is a bleak prospect. It was my regular companion when my family stayed with my grandparents in Scotland for the summer holidays. Their house faced the sea, which meant that there was a rocky seashore to explore. But after five or six years of that it was beginning to pal. There was a limit to how many times you could yell "I just saw something move in the water!" and run screaming from the water's edge. There was also the fact that my sister was now grown up enough to find it demeaning to hang out with someone my age who wanted to play. My parents and grandparents seemed delighted to sit and conduct endlessly dull conversations. And so I would sit and think. I would sit at the top of the garden looking out over the roof of the house to the water beyond, and wonder what it would be like to live on a boat. And I would sit on the rocks on the seashore and watch the birds foraging20 for food, and wonder what it would be like to fly. And I would sit in the sun lounger listening to the rain on the roof, and wonder what it would be like to be old enough to have holidays on your own, in proper hotels with swimming pools and waiters. And sometimes it was lovely just to be sitting and thinking like that for hours on end.