On Boredom - Georges Bernanos

“Well, as I was saying, the world is eaten up by boredom. To perceive this needs a little preliminary thought: you can’t see it all at once. It is like dust. You go about and never notice, you breathe it in, you eat and drink it. It is sifted so fine, it doesn’t even grit on your teeth. But stand still for an instant and there it is, coating your face and hands. To shake off this drizzle of ashes you must be forever on the go. And so people are always “on the go.” Perhaps the answer would be that the world has long been familiar with boredom, that such is the true condition of man. No doubt the seed was scattered all over life, and here and there found fertile soil to take root; but I wonder if man has ever before experienced this contagion, this leprosy of boredom: an aborted despair, a shameful form of despair in some way like the fermentation of a Christianity in decay.”

- Georges Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest, p.2

We watch things pass by in order to forget that they are watching us die. - Joë Bousquet

Adapted to the life whose phemomena it reflects, thought forbids itself to form a part of its totality. We see only the fact in a fact, we forbid ourselves to discover in it an episode of a life doomed to death.
Our thought does not choose to be the thought of our life. We watch things pass by in order to forget that they are watching us die.

*****
If only my existence, like that of a tree, were the fixity of a site... Or else, like that of my mind, the obliteration of all sites. but I am like that passer-by over there; watch him walk, he seems to be running after a car. He is himself, as the feather that flies is a bird.

*****
.. The whole house is changed, and seems to grow and fall silent, to construct around me a solitude in which the mounting silence of space introduces the majesty and the seething of a sea. A word that comes to my lips completes my fascination with the vision of this structure suddenly open to the invisible and to the void. This word is: absence.