On Boredom 1
The Existential Void of Humans
1: The Mania for What No One Can Possess
Why I was so certain that I did not love Cecilia and that I was loved by her, it would be hard to say. As far as I was concerned, the fact that I could make use of her – that is, of her body – as much as I wished, every time that I wished, and in every way that I wished, gave me the illusion that I possessed her absolutely, that I had so complete a relationship with her as to make any further continuation of it useless; and this had convinced me that I did not love her. Similarly I was convinced that Cecilia loved me because I always found her so complaisant, so yielding, so docile. Owing to a very common form of male vanity, I attributed this complaisance to love; whereas I ought to have been put on my guard, to say the least, by the inarticulate and almost automatic quality of this love.
– Quoted from Boredom written by Alberto Moravia
A sense of possession gives a person the illusion of confidence – a conviction that they can control something external to themselves. Nature and the universe are rarely submissive to human demands. Both far transcend us, and we are ultimately obliged to obey their laws, even when such obedience feels unbearable. In materialistic terms, humans are a mere part of the world, so it’s no surprise that we have neither the right nor the capacity to separate ourselves from it or to avoid being affected by its unyielding dictation.
Nevertheless, humans are endowed with a high level of intelligence that enables self-consciousness. Without self-consciousness, humans could not distinguish their own existence from the universe or observe how the world works from an objective vantage point. We would remain, in essence, in a state of being-in-itself. However, because our consciousness operates as being-for-itself, we can separate ourselves from the world in cognitive terms.
In this respect, we can say that the desire to possess things external to ourselves is a more advanced phase of being-for-itself. More simply speaking, the impulse is aimed at expanding the territory of the self where one can dominate anything. Indeed, human history is virtually synonymous with the history of struggles over possession on both an individual and a collective scale. The desire for possession is deeply rooted in our biological instinct to survive, and expanding the self can increase our odds of survival. The stronger we are, the easier we can stay alive. Conversely, a sense of our own insignificance compared to the vast universe terrifies us. Beyond the territory where we can behave as a whimsical king, there spreads an infinite extent of desolate wasteland: what philosophy calls the Absurd. The Absurd perpetually proclaims that humans are powerless, ignorant, trivial beings, that all humans do and have done is fundamentally meaningless. This eerie and malevolent declaration forces us into an apathy devoid of purpose – in other words, the advent of Nihilism.
Desire is, in a general sense, an impulse to fill the void of being. It is always driven by one’s expectations of pleasure which will be released at the moment of fulfillment. It is not the fulfillment itself, but the very process of striving toward expected fulfillment that truly excites us. Therefore, the moment of fulfillment marks the very beginning of a new thirst. In this respect, I agree that it remains a prominent metaphor for the structure of human desire that we drink salty seawater in order to relieve the thirst. This kind of thirst should be called boredom. From a different angle, we can also say that desire is a process of striving for anything that will bore us. After a fleeting moment of satisfaction, we soon become aware of boredom creeping up behind us. Then, we need to look for another object of our desire, and we arrogantly despise what we once struggled painfully to possess. It’s a typical vice deriving from our ignorance that we so easily underestimate the importance of what we have already possessed, of what we’ve been relying upon on a daily basis. It’s just because all we have got feels essentially boring to us. Our starving, ferocious desire for possession doesn’t know how far we should go and when we should pause to reflect on our insatiable appetite.
However, total possession is rarely achievable. Rather, the reverse will happen more frequently, and disappointment and anxiety usually accompany us. The fact that we cannot get what we desire frustrates us, but simultaneously, that hindrance stirs up our desire, and we cannot stop. It will bring us an insane thirst for possession of what we aspire to because it is fundamentally forbidden to achieve. The fact that we can never possess it intensifies our mad hunger for it. This painful tension escalates infinitely without a ceiling to limit its ascent – until, at some point, everything implodes, and a tragic culmination shatters our entire existence.
As if, in fact, by a miracle in reverse – a miracle, that is, which instead of introducing something magical into reality had withdrawn it – Cecilia, who had seemed so desirable as long as I had suspected that she was betraying me, now that I was convinced of the contrary had gone back to being an insignificant object, present to the most superficial perception of my senses but not for that reason truly real. I reflected that the whole of her personality was in that action of lowering the zipper fastening, the whole of her, with no margin of independence or mystery, and that she was for that very reason non-existent; that she had been already possessed beforehand, even before sexual intercourse had given a superfluous confirmation to this possession by feeling; possessed and therefore boring.
– From Boredom by Alberto Moravia
This odd structure of desire feels suffocating. Desire for possession needs its object to resist its oppressive control. Excess of submissiveness feels boring, and the difficulty of possession makes the object more attractive. To possess anything entirely means to unveil all the mysteries that it can possibly contain. In other words, the absolute attainment of possession leaves no hidden aspect untouched, and therefore, one no longer has any margin to explore. There is no secret, so we can never be captivated by the possibility of novel discovery. The very moment of exposure excites us most. As a result, paradoxically, an object’s defiance of our control, which implies the failure of total possession, sets our desire on fire. We lose our heads trying to dismantle the object’s independence, and its resistance intensifies the degree of thrill.
Physical possession, usually, was no more than the repetition of a preceding mental possession, that is, it merely confirmed the boredom which made Cecilia unreal and absurd to me. But this time I felt that possession appeared to confirm my inability truly to possess her. However roughly I treated her, however much I squeezed her and bit her and penetrated her, I failed to possess Cecilia and she was elsewhere, God knows where.
In Dino’s tragic yet ridiculous case, his masculine assumption that physical possession is equivalent to psychological ownership is made invalid, because she does not renounce her promiscuous affairs with other men even though she maintains innocently that she loves him. The act of lovemaking does not assure that he can possess her whole existence. Therefore, despite sleeping with her repeatedly, Dino cannot be relieved of his persistent thirst for total possession of her. Above all, it’s suggestive that when Dino realizes he can by no means possess her, he experiences a vivid, undeniable sense of reality. At that point, there remains no space for boredom. On the contrary, he wants all the more to possess her entire existence. For Dino, reality is nothing other than the antonym of boredom.
It may be opportune at this point for me to say a few words on the subject of boredom, a feeling which I shall have reason to mention frequently in the course of these pages. However far back into the years I probe in memory, I recall having suffered always from boredom. But it is important to understand what I mean by this word. For many people boredom is the opposite of amusement; and amusement means distraction, forgetfulness. For me, boredom is not the opposite of amusement; I might even go so far as to say that in certain of its aspects it actually resembles amusement inasmuch as it gives rise to distraction and forgetfulness, even if of a very special type. Boredom to me consists in a kind of insufficiency, or inadequacy, or lack of reality.
Based upon Dino’s peculiar definition of boredom, one gets bored when one loses a sense of reality – that is to say, when one realizes one has no substantial relationships with the outer world. In other words, boredom derives from a sense of powerlessness in one’s interaction with reality. To put it another way, the term self-efficacy would be applicable to this condition. His actions, whatever they may be, have no influence upon the world outside, so he cannot find any meaning in his own conduct. Whether he strives or remains indolent, the outcome of his actions remains unchanged, because he is an insignificant being. As a result, he becomes bored. He feels that he is completely separated from reality, that the entire universe disregards him, and ultimately, that it does not matter at all whether he is alive or dead. However, his agony cannot be attributed solely to this basic description, because in reality, he is not socially powerless, but rather a man of significant wealth. His powerlessness results from neither poverty nor misery. Indeed, he has various options for his social existence, yet he cannot suppress his feeling that he is essentially alienated from reality.
At the end of the war I went back to live with my mother who, in the meantime, had acquired a big villa on the Via Appia. I had hoped, as I said, that painting had overcome boredom once and for all, but I realized almost at once that this was not so. I started suffering from boredom again in spite of my painting; in fact, since boredom automatically interrupted painting, I became conscious of the intensity and frequency of my old trouble more acutely than before I had started painting. Thus the problem of my boredom presented itself again, unchanged. I started asking myself what could be the reasons for it, and by process of elimination arrived at the conclusion that perhaps I was bored because I was rich and that if I were poor I would not be bored.
His wealth is regarded by the author as one of the fatal sources of his boredom. His incurable contempt, or chronic antagonism toward his wealthy mother, derives from his suspicion that wealth forces him to suffer from boredom to this unbearable degree. The fortune granted by his mother serves as evident proof of his shameful dependence on her, because it is not he who has earned such financial abundance. Thus, he tries to escape from his mother’s control, pretending to be a poor painter. By doing so, he strives to rebuild a solid interaction with reality, thereby attempting to cure himself of dreadful boredom. In this respect, it is particularly insightful to consider what the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote in his essay.
Get Miura Hitoshi’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But if this struggle comes to an end, his unemployed forces become a burden to him; and he has to set to work and play with them, – to use them, I mean, for no purpose at all, beyond avoiding the other source of human suffering, boredom, to which he is at once exposed. It is the upper classes, people of wealth, who are the greatest victims of boredom.
An abundance of wealth saves Dino from desperate struggles to secure necessities in everyday life, quite easily satisfying his needs with banknotes and checks. It is no doubt a comfortable situation, but simultaneously, insidious boredom cannot be avoided. Satisfaction without a process of attainment tastes like diluted wine. Fleeting delights come and go, and his life becomes nothing other than an incessant series of payments. Paradoxically, without the necessity of exhausting effort to satiate desires, a thirst recurs acutely, becoming more unbearable than before. Dino cannot avoid falling into an insatiable hunger soon after satisfaction, and therefore, paralyzing boredom becomes his fate. Consequently, he attempts to abandon wealth as if dreading a fatal curse. However, this cannot be the final solution to save him from permanent agony. If he were a poor man, he would simply fail to satisfy his modest needs. Either way, his suffering is assured.
2: Can Humans Always Possess Reality?
Regarding Dino’s situation, another dimension emerges. Wealthy people rarely hesitate to pay for what they desire, possessing more than enough financial power to satisfy all their needs. Their existence is inextricably bound to their possessions; in other words, for them, to live is synonymous with to possess. However, can we say definitively that possession is the only way for humans to relate to reality? Especially when one communicates with someone else, is it ethical to attempt to possess them? In ethical terms, the proper objects of possession are material things, not fellow human beings. This is because the concept of possession fundamentally indicates a form of oppressive dominance and one-sided control over things, leaving the possessed with no independent agency. Abstractly speaking, possession is tantamount to the denial of otherness. However, some wealthy people are so accustomed to possessing things through their immense financial power that they apply the same transactional principle to human beings as they do to material things. In Dino’s case, he applies this very principle to his intimate relationships with women.
As if, in fact, by a miracle in reverse – a miracle, that is, which instead of introducing something magical into reality had withdrawn it – Cecilia, who had seemed so desirable as long as I had suspected that she was betraying me, now that I was convinced of the contrary had gone back to being an insignificant object, present to the most superficial perception of my senses but not for that reason truly real. I reflected that the whole of her personality was in that action of lowering the zipper fastening, the whole of her, with no margin of independence or mystery, and that she was for that very reason non-existent; that she had been already possessed beforehand, even before sexual intercourse had given a superfluous confirmation to this possession by feeling; possessed and therefore boring.
Can one really claim a right to possess another person? Is it possible to justify such an arrogant claim? Cecilia’s obedient attitude toward Dino’s selfish lust is regarded as evident proof of her love for Dino, but it is deeply suspicious. Her excessive submissiveness convinces him that he has succeeded in possessing her entire being. In this respect, the boredom in his relationship with Cecilia resembles the ignorance of an arrogant snob who insists that he knows everything about the subject, but actually has only an imperfect, superficial grasp of it. Even so, it is true that Dino believes that he really possesses Cecilia wholly, and therefore, he is bored with her no matter how often he has slept with her. However, some hints of her betrayal shatter Dino’s naive reassurance, abruptly awakening him from his former boredom.
Cecilia, or in other words, reality. I knew that I must stay in my car until I saw her appear in the doorway, but at the same time I felt a great desire to go away. Once again, in the light of this twofold, contradictory feeling, I saw that what had so often made me abandon my spying, during these last days, had not been a revolt of dignity but rather a repugnance for Cecilia as she really was – that is, in a word, for reality.
When Cecilia escapes from Dino’s control, he at last confronts what reality truly is. His egotistic illusion has collapsed; his sense of omnipotence has shattered into pieces. Needless to say, reality is fundamentally beyond his control, operating according to its own laws regardless of his subjective intentions or expectations. In other words, his fanatical obsession with total possession is founded upon a fundamental misapprehension of reality. Perhaps his boredom serves as a subconscious defense mechanism against a reality he cannot bend to his will. Boredom is not the root cause of his inability to deal with reality. His sense of alienation from reality is not an inevitable outcome of unknown mechanisms, but the result of his own subconscious choice. So long as he believes in his possession of reality, he feels boredom because he sees only the convenient illusion built up by his wealthy upbringing – the illusion that he can possess anything he desires. Relying on that conviction, he need not suffer from any visceral pain, though boredom cannot be avoided.
The feeling of boredom originates for me in a sense of the absurdity of a reality which is insufficient, or anyhow unable, to convince me of its own effective existence. For example, I may be looking with some degree of attentiveness at a tumbler. As long as I say to myself that this tumbler is a glass or metal vessel made for the purpose of putting liquid into it and carrying it to one’s lips without upsetting it – as long as I am able to represent the tumbler to myself in a convincing manner – so long shall I feel that I have some sort of a relationship with it, a relationship close enough to make me believe in its existence and also, on a subordinate level, in my own. But once the tumbler withers away and loses its vitality in the manner I have described, or, in other words, reveals itself to me as something foreign, something with which I have no relationship, once it appears to me as an absurd object – then from that very absurdity springs boredom, which when all is said and done is simply a kind of incommunicability and the incapacity to disengage oneself from it.
His inability to access the objective world – so to speak, the absence of any authentic relationship to the world outside – is the core basis of his chronic boredom. For him, boredom does not mean a transient lack of amusement that is familiar to everyone, but a manifestation of his distorted relationship with reality. Strictly speaking, he lacks the ability to perceive the world beyond the narrow sphere of his own existence. He can possess anything that attracts him, but he does not know any other way of interacting with external objects. This fundamental defect can be substantiated by the fact that he is a failed painter.
And so the empty canvas that now stood on the easel was not just an ordinary canvas which had not yet been used; it was a particular canvas that I had placed on the easel at the termination of a long job of work. In effect, I thought, seeking to console myself against the sense of catastrophe that was throttling me, this canvas, similar in appearance to so many other canvases but for me fraught with meaning and consequence, could be the starting point from which I could now begin all over again in complete freedom, just as if those ten years of painting had not gone by and I myself were still twenty-five, as I was when I had left my mother’s house and had gone to live in the studio in Via Margutta in order to devote myself in complete leisure to painting. On the other hand, it might well be – in fact it was highly probable – that the empty canvas now flaunting itself on the easel was the outward sign of a development no less intimate and no less necessary but entirely negative, a development which might lead me, by imperceptible stages, to complete impotence.
Assuming the mission of a painter is to establish a novel kind of relationship with reality, Dino’s impotence as a painter proves that he fails to forge one. To put it simply, he has no grasp of the outer world, and therefore, he has no capacity to fill empty canvases. The sole exception – the only way he knows how to interact – is to possess. Despite his desperate love for Cecilia and his feverish affair with her, Dino fails to possess her – a woman who cannot understand why he is obsessed with the idea of exclusive possession. In this respect, Cecilia also lacks the ability to communicate with the outer world. The most notable of their shared characteristics is their indifference to the objective world. It is highlighted repeatedly in the novel that Cecilia has no interest in the intricacies of external things. Dino is amazed again and again by her inability to remember past events, but in truth, he differs little from her. Furthermore, Dino’s contradictory disposition compounds the impasse. When Dino believes that Cecilia is flawlessly faithful to him, he becomes bored with her. On the other hand, when he suspects she is betraying him, his desire for her intensifies into a morbid fixation. In order to allay his own envy, Dino strives to debase her by various means, but all his attempts fail. She behaves submissively, yet never assents to his demand for total and exclusive possession.
The canvas was empty, I went on thinking confusedly, because Cecilia eluded me; my mind was empty because reality eluded me. Reality and Cecilia were the two words that echoed more and more feebly in my head; evoking two different operations which I felt, nevertheless, to be connected by an undoubted link. It seemed clear to me that this link was the mania to possess, and that both operations were wrecked by the impossibility of doing so. As I thought over these things, more and more wearily, I fell asleep.
Reality refuses to be possessed. Moreover, possession is merely an artificial illusion shared among human beings alone. Likewise, no tyrant can possess a human being in any true sense. Wealth is nothing other than a vast accumulation of possessions; therefore, it is no surprise that Dino equates possessing his lover with sincere affection. However, no one can validate his selfish, arrogant stance. The only solution left to him is his own emancipation from this obsessive desire for possession – his fanatical impulse to dominate the objective world.
At this point I must admit that my ideas became confused. I recalled that from the very beginning it had seemed to me that my relationship with Cecilia had differed in no way from my contact with reality; in other words, that my fundamental reasons for ceasing to paint had been the same as those for which I had attempted to kill myself. But now? In the end I said to myself that, for the moment, I had to remain in bed for more than a month and that it was too soon to come to any sort of decision. Once I was well, I would go back to the studio and try to start painting again. I say that I would try, because I was not at all sure that the connection I had seen for so long between Cecilia and my painting really existed; or that loving Cecilia in a new way would mean starting to paint again. Here again, only experience would be able to provide an answer.
Despite the repulsive depictions of Dino’s paranoid mania, his last monologue resonates with a calm, transparent clarity. His point of view has changed since his near-fatal accident, and his interaction with the outer world finds a whole new path. To put it concisely, the key to liberating him from his persistent obsession is to relinquish the desire to possess – to accept the radical impossibility of controlling the objective world. But how, precisely, does he achieve this revolutionary conversion?
Written on Saturday, 18th July 2026.
Revised on Thursday, 27th August 2026.
