I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
My copy of Stone Upon Stone is a library discard I bought used on Amazon last year.
I have no way of telling when it was last checked out, but I wouldn’t be surprised if in the book’s years of residence at North Haven Memorial Library in New Haven, CT, it wasn’t checked out once.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if, in its life on my bookshelf, it doesn’t get read again—though I hope it does.
I almost didn’t even read it once.
I picked up the book after seeing it mentioned in passing on Colin Meloy’s (the frontman of the Decemberists) newsletter. The title intrigued me, and the reviews were glowing. It was originally written in Polish by a literary master, and the translation won a big award. “Hailed as one of the best ever books in translation,” the Amazon blurb begins. “A hymn in praise of life,” says one of the endorsements on the back cover.
The voice grabbed me on the first page, where we learn how the narrator’s money troubles are preventing him from finishing the tomb he’d started building. But soon the narration went meandering off into rural Polish life and the narrator’s family history and different corners of World War II. Stories led to other stories before they finished, leaving behind knots of unresolved tension like in One Thousand and One Nights.
The beginning of the book had its moments, and every page had some poignant observation or beautiful flourish of language, but I kept waiting for it to add up to something bigger. I can’t bring myself to finish this if it isn’t going anywhere, I thought. I need it to be worthwhile. So I set the book aside. But something in the book called back to me, and then I proceeded little by little, for months, through its 534 pages. I finished it this week.
We don’t often give things this kind of time anymore.
A student of mine commented recently that if a TV show doesn’t grab him in the first five minutes, he’ll move on to the next one. There’s no shortage of new shows to watch. This mindset has even affected shorter-form media; “the Spotify sound” describes how songs are starting faster and getting shorter. It’s long been known that successful writing for the web gets right to the point and uses short paragraphs and bullet points.
But some pleasures in life need time to bloom, and I’m starting to think these may be deeper pleasures than the ones that come quickly.
Long distance running may be like that. You may know that’s my biggest hobby, running a long time. It can be boring. But it’s only through the boredom that it pays off. Even if you want to think of it through just a very narrow lens, consider the “runner’s high.” This is a physiological state that can be quite pleasurable, but it takes hours of consistent low-level physical activity to encounter it. Quit too early and you won’t get there. And that’s to say nothing of the other benefits and joys of running.
When it comes to Stone Upon Stone, I wouldn’t exactly say I loved it, and I wouldn’t quite recommend the book to just anybody. But the book got to me in a way only a book like that can—I’m also thinking of other long reads like Infinite Jest, Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time. (For the record, I’ve only read the first three volumes of the latter; the fourth has been on my “read next” shelf for about four years.) Reading Stone Upon Stone, I felt like I got to know another person, like I spent time inhabiting his psyche. And it shaped my sense of what is possible in human life. That’s the best we can hope for from fiction, and the whole reason we read it.
Good books give us access to a person who may or may not exist, and this makes me think of human relationships generally. Sometimes we are boring to each other. We don’t always have things to talk about. Sometimes we’re tired. But we are better with each other, and we also live better and longer and even think more clearly. Being in relationship is a slow burn—getting to know a person over months, years, decades.
All the trends I’ve mentioned so far share the element of speeding up. Even human relationships: already back in 1970 Alvin Toffler noted in Future Shock that the average duration of human relationships was shortening.
And when it comes to relationships, we can also see other changes on the horizon. With the proliferation of chatbots in the past few years, companies such as Replika are marketing digital companions—“companions who care,” their slogan specifies. There are AI girlfriends (evidently much more common than AI boyfriends, make of that what you will), and even AI versions of your dead loved ones. Some people are even trying to get married to their AI companions.
Unlike a human, an AI companion will always have things to talk about with you. It will make you laugh. You’ll never be bored. But if you rely on AI companions, you will miss out on the depth of what life has to offer. Unfortunately, AI companions have come along at a time when we are also witnessing a worldwide loneliness pandemic. They will only make things worse.
Philosophy at its best (and it is not usually at its best) provides a guide for life. And to that end there is a surprisingly robust conversation about boredom in the history of philosophy.
While some philosophers saw only misery in boredom—Schopenhauer, for example, thought boredom was proof that existence is worthless—many philosophers realized the paradoxical value of boredom. Nietzsche supposed that a person who blocked all boredom from their life would also block access to their deepest self. Much more recently, Elpidorou in his book Propelled makes the case that discontented emotions such as boredom and frustration are precisely what propel us into things that we value.
We seem to be allergic to boredom today. The moment we start to feel a spell of it coming on, we reach for our phone. Whether we’re on the toilet, in the checkout line or at a stoplight, we can’t conscience two seconds with our own minds. A 2014 study found that two-thirds of people would rather give themselves electric shocks than spend a few minutes alone with nothing else to do.
Our allergy to boredom is an issue of pleasure and meaning, but it’s also—more pragmatically—an issue of good thinking. Digital technologies may be making us more scattered thinkers, less able to sustain the focus required for deep work—the kind of work that will allow us to make creative breakthroughs and also experience personal meaning. Back in 2010 Nicholas Carr wrote The Shallows making some of these points, and more Johann Hari’s book Stolen Focus gives a more recent account.
I would maintain that one way to hone your attention and re-enable yourself to do deep work is by cultivating the practice of reading boring books (or “boring” books?), listening to long songs, and watching slow movies. And of course it’s not just about thinking better and being more creative and productive, but about living a more meaningful and satisfying life.
I guess it’s time to pick up that fourth volume of In Search of Lost Time.
Ports of Call
On rereading: This week’s post reminds me of a paper I published a few years back in Journal of Documentation, “Rereading, art-making and other joys: toward a theory of information, repetition and the good life.” You may find it interesting.
Divorced by mistake: A funny (to those not involved) example of the consequences of bad design: a lawyer picked the wrong name from a dropdown list and filed a divorce for someone who was happily married.
Top Chef: Wisconsin: I got into Top Chef thanks to my roommate during my master’s program, and this season is set in my home state!