Boredom permeates the modern world;21 it is born in the bourgeois world, but that same world condemns it and disowns it like a stepchild. Boredom results in idleness (though the person who is bored, as in the case of seventeenth-century nobility, has nothing to do in the first place), and idleness is branded by the world at large as laziness, which, next to sorrow and boredom, is the third main trait of melancholia in the modern age. In the Middle Ages, sloth, or acedia, likewise denoted neglect of earthly business, but it was condemned first and foremost as a sin against God; in the modern age, however, it was not so much a sin against God as against the world.22 The world can offer a million arguments and charges against lazy people — those reasons, however, become self-defeating at some point. Bored people are fed up with the world, and that is a sign of the tediousness of the world itself. “Why, then, is action more justified than inaction?” a bored person might ask, and since boredom is intertwined with dire melancholia, drawing attention to the transience and dissolution that lie in wait in everything, he receives no satisfactory answer. Others, of course, list numerous reasons, from the practical aspects of making money to the metaphysical notion of self-creation, yet none of that moves a bored, lazy person, and to borrow some words from Friedrich Schlegeclass="underline" “What’s the point, then, of this unremitting aspiration and progress without rest and purpose? Can this storm and stress provide nourishing sap or beautiful form to the infinite plant of humanity, growing unnoticed by itself and cultivating itself? This empty, restless activity is nothing but a Nordic barbarity and so leads to nothing but boredom — our own and others!” (Lucinde and the Fragments, 65).
Of course, not every lazy person is melancholic; but the possibility of turning melancholic is implied in laziness, as much as in boredom.23 There is no great diversity in the expression of indolence, yet on the other hand, it can be experienced in many ways: those who become melancholic (or those melancholics who become lazy) are characterized by the aforesaid desperate boredom. The laziness of those who are beyond the daily arrangements of this world, and whose boredom is boundless, is not laziness in the ordinary sense of the word: their inaction is a kind of negative occupation. Petrarch contrasted the miser occupatus—the wretched workaholic — with the felix solitarius—the happy loner; people who immerse themselves in philosophical preoccupations are, from a certain viewpoint, happy — happy because, presumably, they experience the world differently from people who hustle and bustle. Meditation has always been one of the distinguishing marks of melancholia; in its own fashion, it facilitates the creation of a new world in much the same way as regular work does. In the eyes of a bored and “idle” melancholic, there is in any case no essential difference between contemplation and practical occupation — it was a distinction dreamed up by a bustling world, among other reasons, precisely so that it might brand melancholics, stigmatize them as outlaws, detrimental to the cause of civil society. Robert Burton, who in many respects was still a child of the Middle Ages, explained how a conscientious citizen saw the general melancholia of the nobility of his days as a function of their laziness and idleness: “For idleness is an appendix to nobility; they count it a disgrace to work, and spend all their days in sports, recreations, and pastimes, and will therefore take no pains; be of no vocation; they feed liberally; fare well, want exercise, action, employment. . and company to their desires” (Burton, Anatomy, partition 1, sec. 2, member 2, subsec. 6, 244). Such nobles were not simply idle, however: they were different from ordinary civilians. Even if a growing bourgeoisie managed to “break them in” (that is, either persuade them to adjust to a civil mentality or destroy them), it was unable to prevent indolence and inactivity, hitherto considered the preserve solely of the nobility, from raising their heads within the civil world as welclass="underline" it has already been seen how Sir William Temple in 1690, a full generation after the Civil War, considered England to be the region of spleen, and the mercantile-spirited island nation did not lose that prerogative in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.24 (The French, with similar pride, considered tedium a characteristically French malady.) Boredom has kept company with the civil world right up to the present day. It is not even necessary to be melancholic to conclude from this that boredom is an essential part of that world and that a utilitarian civil order primed for practical action would be inconceivable without idleness. It is one and the same world that “sweats” indolence out of itself while also sweating profusely in frenzied activity.