Time is the most private place, and the loneliest — an interior chamber entirely inaccessible to another consciousness, no matter how proximate in space. In time, we are always alone — for time is the substance we are made of, but each of us is a sealed vial.

Our first great encounter with the interiority of time is the childhood experience of boredom — an experience that never leaves us, though we come to mask it with our adult addiction to productivity, with the strobe light of pleasure.

Boredom is time laid bare, hollowed of meaning, blank as death. It is there, in this restlessness to do, in this urgency to live, that we first understand mortality. It is there we first begin to realize, in Annie Dillard’s immortal words, that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Boredom is the menacing sense that we are not spending our lives — our lives are spending us.

The other day I watched an immense queue at the airport security line, people of every kind and every age, uniformly anod at their smartphones. In this age of ready relief from practical boredom, it is easy to forget the existential boredom pulsating beneath our lives. But, paradoxically, it is that other, deeper boredom that fires us with the yearning for meaning, for filling our sliver of allotted time with aliveness — this is why some of humanity’s greatest minds have stood in defense of boredom.

In the summer of 1989, two years after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature and two decades after he fled the Soviet dictatorship with the help of W.H. Auden, the great Russian poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940–January 28, 1996) addressed the graduating class of Dartmouth College with a magnificent speech later adapted into an essay and published in the posthumous collection On Grief and Reason: Essays (public library) under the title “In Praise of Boredom.”

Art by Violeta Lópiz for At the Drop of a Cat

Boredom haunts the basic structure of human life: Although our habits and patterns, which hinge on repetition, give shape to our days, they can also become a prison as the vitalizing rhythm of repetition ossifies into monotonous repetitiveness. Brodsky observes:

Everything that displays a pattern is pregnant with boredom.

[…]

You’ll be bored with your work, your friends, your spouses, your lovers, the view from your window, the furniture or wallpaper in your room, your thoughts, yourselves. Accordingly, you’ll try to devise ways to escape. Apart from the self-gratifying gadgets… you may take up changing jobs, residence, company, country, climate… You may lump all these together; and for a while, that may work. Until the day, of course, when you wake up in your bedroom amid a new family and a different wallpaper, in a different state and climate… yet with the same stale feeling toward the light of day pouring in through your window. You’ll put on your loafers only to discover they’re lacking bootstraps to lift yourself out of what your recognize. Depending on your temperament or the age you are at, you will either panic or resign yourself to the familiarity of the sensation; or else you’ll go through the rigmarole of change once more.

Drawing on Robert Frost’s famous line “the best way out is always through,” Brodsky offers the only true remedy for boredom:

When hit by boredom, go for it. Let yourself be crushed by it; submerge, hit bottom. In general, with things unpleasant, the rule is, the sooner you hit bottom, the faster you surface.

This total surrender to boredom opens a portal of perspective. Out of its blankness surges a sudden fount of meaning. Brodsky writes:

Boredom is your window on time, on those properties of it one tends to ignore to the likely peril of one’s mental equilibrium. In short, it is your window on time’s infinity, which is to say, on your insignificance in it.

[…]

Boredom is an invasion of time into your set of values. It puts your existence into its perspective, the net result of which is precision and humility. The former, it must be noted, breeds the latter. The more you learn about your own size, the more humble and compassionate you become to your likes, to that dust aswirl in a sunbeam or already immobile atop your table. Ah, how much life went into those flecks! Not from your point of view but from theirs. You are to them what time is to you; that’s why they look so small.

Art by Giuliano Cucco from Before I Grew Up

In consonance with philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s insight that “a creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger” — for what is boredom if not the howl of need, the need for significance — Brodsky adds:

You are insignificant because you are finite. Yet the more finite a thing is, the more it is charged with life, emotions, joy, fears, compassion. For infinity is not terribly lively, not terribly emotional. Your boredom, at least, tells you that much. Because your boredom is the boredom of infinity.

[…]

So try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain… passion’s frequent aftermath… When you hurt, you know that at least you haven’t been deceived (by your body or by your psyche). By the same token, what’s good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of the meaninglessness of your own, of everything else’s existence, is that it is not a deception.

[…]

Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which anyhow are larger than you. No doubt you’ll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don’t think you’ve goofed somewhere along the line, don’t try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as the poet said, “Believe your pain.” This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you is. Remember all along that there is no embrace in this world that won’t finally unclasp.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

With an eye to this inevitability of change, brutal and sanctifying, rife with ambivalence, he adds:

What lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey [on a] runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it’s not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort form the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out to be, the train doesn’t stop there for good. Therefore, you are never stuck — not even when you feel you are; for this place today becomes your past… receding for you, for that train is in constant motion. It will be receding for you even when you feel that you are stuck. So… look at it with all the tenderness you can muster, for you are looking at your past.

Complement with Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness, Susan Sontag on the creative purpose of boredom, and Bertrand Russell on the vital role of “fruitful monotony” in a full life, then revisit Brodsky on the greatest antidote to evil and the six rules of a good life.

“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,” quantum pioneer Niels Bohr wrote of the subjective reality in which we live out our human lives, as he distinguished it from the objective reality of the universe. But for all that religions have done to moor us amid the uncertainty of time, space, and being, to give us a sense of agency and a sense of morality, they have also spurred the most violent conflicts in the history of our species — that infinitely dangerous mass rationalization of self-righteousness we call war.

Long before she came to reckon with the meaning of God in her visionary Parable of the Sower, the young Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) considered the perils of organized religion in a 1980 interview included in Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (public library).

Octavia Butler by Katy Horan from Literary Witches — an illustrated celebration of women writers who have enchanted and transformed our world.

With an eye to the reality of what happens when we die, she reflects:

My mother is very religious so I’m very much aware of the attitude that these are the last days. But, let’s face it, no matter where we have been in history, whoever has existed has been living in the last days… their own. When each of us dies the world ends for us.

[…]

The kind of religion that I’m seeing now is not the religion of love and it scares me. We need to outgrow it.

A century after Mark Twain admonished against how religion is used to justify injustice, she adds:

Religion has played such a large part in the lives of human beings throughout human history. In some ways, I wish we could outgrow it; I think at this point it does a lot of harm. But then, I’m fairly sure that if we do outgrow it, we’ll find other reasons to kill and persecute each other. I wish we were able to depend on ethical systems that did not involve the Big Policeman in the sky.

Art by Francisco de Holanda, 1573. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

A better way of relating to each other, Butler intimates, can be found in the science of the natural world. Influenced by evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis’s pioneering work on symbiosis, she reflects:

[Lynn Margulis] was not talking about people. She’s talking mainly about microorganisms, but still, it’s true, I think with people as well as some animals and microorganisms, on many levels, we wind up being strengthened by what we join, or what joins us, as well as by what we combat.

There is something lovely in reconfiguring religion as this relational interdependence of selves, rooted not in our ideology but in our biology. This, perhaps, is what moved Butler to write nearly two decades later: “To shape God, shape Self.”

Complement with the poetic physicist Alan Lightman on spirituality for the science-spirited and the great naturalist John Muir, writing a century before him, on nature as religion, then revisit Octavia Butler on how we become who we are and her advice on writing.

This is the great paradox: that human life, lived between the time of starlings and the time of stars, is made meaningful entirely inside the self, but the self is a mirage of the mind, a figment of cohesion that makes the chaos and transience bearable. A few times a lifetime, if you are lucky, something — an encounter with nature, a work of art, a great love — sparks what Iris Murdoch so wonderfully termed “an occasion for unselfing,” dismantling the cathedral of illusion and rendering you one with everything that ever was and ever will be. Because time is the substance of being, past and future meld into one, then vanish altogether. For a moment you become one with the absolute — not a self islanded in time, but an oceanic particle of eternity.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow termed such moments of timelessness and selflessness peak experiences — “the most blissful and perfect moments of life” — and placed them atop his seminal hierarchy of needs, in the realm of transcendence. He believed that every religion arose from them — from “the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer.” After interviewing thousands of people about their peak experiences, Maslow uncovered the core common denominator — a profound sense that the universe is a harmonious totality to which one belongs and of which one is an indelible part, as essential to the integrated whole as any other, existing outside time.

Art by Dorothy Lathrop, 1922. (Available as a print and as stationery cards.)

I know of no more beautiful or deeply felt account of such contact with eternity than the one Richard Jefferies (November 6, 1848–August 14, 1887), patron saint of modern conservation, relays in his altogether breathtaking spiritual autobiography The Story of My Heart (public library).

In the final years of his short life, Jefferies touched transcendence while climbing a hill he climbed regularly. (This is part of the mystery we are — why peak experiences unfold when they do, often in the midst of something familiar, something encountered countless times before without this shimmer of the miraculous.) Crowning his magnificent account of the experience is the revelation that presence — this prayerful attention to the here and now — is the supreme portal to eternity. A generation after Kierkegaard insisted that “the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity” and a century before Mary Oliver drew on Blake and Whitman to observe that “all eternity is in the moment,” Jefferies reflects:

Realising that spirit, recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it. The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years it will still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all is and will be ever, in now.

And yet it is only through the body — this perishable reliquary of life — that the mind can grasp the abstraction of timelessness; it is only through absolute presence with the aliveness of the moment that the soul can sing with the ecstasy of eternity. Jefferies writes:

I dip my hand in the brook and feel the stream; in an instant the particles of water which first touched me have floated yards down the current, my hand remains there. I take my hand away, and the flow — the time — of the brook does not exist to me. The great clock of the firmament, the sun and the stars, the crescent moon, the earth circling two thousand times, is no more to me than the flow of the brook when my hand is withdrawn; my soul has never been, and never can be, dipped in time. Time has never existed, and never will; it is a purely artificial arrangement. It is eternity now, it always was eternity, and always will be.

Complement these fragments of the wholly soul-slaking Story of My Heart with two centuries of ravishing reflections on time, from Borges to Nina Simone, then revisit Jefferies on nature as a prayer for presence and his contemporary Hermann Hesse on discovering the soul beneath the self.

THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE BOOK