La escuela del aburrimiento
Luigi Amara

ESSAY | 2012 | 288 pages

The hurried present faces up to the enemy of boredom in very diverse ways: either through hypnosis in the hands of the screen, never-ending work, altered states of consciousness or through the infinite means of entertainment at our disposal. It is all about denying, never getting bored, being always busy. Perhaps that’s why George Steiner called modernity “the systematic suppression of silence.”

To get to know it properly, the poet and essayist Luigi Amara lets boredom catch him in its claws. After being guided by some of its greatest interpreters – Pascal and Montaigne among others – he decides to lock himself in a room with his own boredom for a few weeks without any technological toys to help him to fight it. Afterwards, he gives himself shock therapy by travelling to the world capital of entertainment, Las Vegas, where he finds that boredom is invisible, but only because it is everywhere. His descent to the underworld of boredom ends up becoming a journey of initiation as he becomes the founding member of ‘Yawning International’, the world’s only organization that renders cult to boredom. In La escuela del aburrimiento, Luigi Amara undresses the ideology of boredom, pointing out that the fear it provokes is actually much worse than its manifestation. "It is the fear of being trapped in a job for life, in a single social ‘role’, in being with the same person: the fear that the decline of desire pre-figures the arrival of death. Not moving, being stuck in a rut, without oxygen and without alternatives. Crying in a dark room because it starts to resemble our own coffin".

RIGHTS: spanish SEXTO PISO