无聊生活当真令人百无聊赖?_大学英语阅读

无聊生活当真令人百无聊赖?

“无聊”算得上现代人口头儿的高频词。批评人士认为无聊是时间充裕、衣食无忧带来的负面影响。本文作者似乎不这么看，他认为“愉悦的无聊”具有一种活跃的气质，一种你从怠惰之暗走入灵感之光时所感受到的气质。

A friend and I are wandering through the lush gardens of a grand country home.[2] “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,[3] but I’m not listening. “Lazing[4] about,” I continue. “Wonderfully bored.” My friend’s face swivels[5] 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.[6]

There’s something exquisite about boredom. Like melancholy[7] 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.