Dispatches from the present
I owe the discovery of my favorite book to my bad knees. Years of competitive running had turned the region between my femur and patella into bonemeal. I swapped out my daily run for a severe biking addiction, the most heavenly of pastimes: low impact yet still setting me loose outside for long stretches of the day, mapping out a new city while simultaneously discovering my capacity to be alone with my thoughts.
My capacity, I soon discovered, was meager. Those wind-whipped hours of pedaling reduced my thoughts to a disquieting apparatus of pure perception. Magnolia tree; silver car; crossing guard towing preschoolers; bridge; speed bump—my brain only accepted inputs, and really just those requiring speed modulation. This may sound like pseudo-meditation, and maybe it was. But I thought I was going crazy. I would become agitated and end my rides early; I worried I was too far gone, too accustomed to the mental scattershot of the attention-span wars.
Audiobooks became my cycling companion. With the limitations of a single free Audible credit, I devised an unromantic and mercenary selection criterion evaluating solely by length. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, in all its 39-hour splendor, would do nicely.
After two rides my cost-benefit analysis ran afoul, as they are wont to do. I stopped listening. The Charles Baudelaire epigraph that opened the book portended my encounter perfectly: “an oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” I was bored. So I bought the physical book because, unlike audiobooks, reading physically isn’t a fixed gear. To get through Bolaño’s appetite for referential and digressive gristle, I needed to be able to skim when my eyes began to glaze.
Boredom, within certain academic or think-piece circles, is coded as an admission of ignorance. Oh, so you didn’t really get it? But more and more, especially for those twentysomethings shaped by the informational, pornographic and affective blitzkrieg that is our common cultural denominator, boredom is our way of being. Its absence, its omnipresence. How do we inhabit our own mental landscape when working memory and executive control have atrophied, leeched dry by tech companies?
Those offering remedies to digital expansionism have spawned a surplus of useless discourse that reads like dishonest self-help. They lionize boredom as a goal in and of itself, heralding it as the fulcrum to swing us back onto the right track. Delete Instagram! Break the algorithm! Get out of the doomscroll slipstream! Just sit in your boredom and let the voice of God (or life) be heard. Of course, this very discourse often lives on the platforms directly profiting from the attentionless legions. The number of YouTube videos I have watched about breaking YouTube addiction is humiliating.
An indifference to demanding beauty is the nicest way to define us (the attentionless legion), I think.
On my first drift through 2666, I certainly missed the beauty and its shape. Only fragments stood out. The backstory of a restaurant mascot told through floor tiles, paintings, pinatas and murals all along the walls. A character discovering, retold across the pages of another peripheral character’s recovered diary, the plot of a Russian science fiction novel. The comparative sexual prowess of a Frenchman versus a Spaniard. An itemized list of a medic’s taco order from a truck just a minute’s walk from where a body was discovered. But this is Bolaño at his peak: he is a magpie fabulist, after all, a narrative ragpicker. These fragments are swirling trick-mirror visions, discrete forms, momentary hallucinations masquerading as revelations, all of which occasionally gesture to an unfathomable whole.
2666 reaches its pinnacle in its most emblematic—and famous—section: “The Part About the Crimes,” an over-three-hundred-page catalogue of the hundreds of femicides that took place in the town of Santa Teresa between 1993 and 1997. Here Bolaño layers seemingly identical vignettes reciting the names of the women killed, their causes of death, where the remains were discovered, how the police bungled or ignored the case, the maquiladoras where the women worked and occasionally (crumbs for the reader) unfinished ancillary stories that go nowhere. This may all sound miserable to the young reader who, like myself, struggles to make it all the way through a soup recipe. And it was miserable—to ride to, that is—but I made it through my first read of the book. I skimmed where digression grew too great, Bolaño’s disquisitions too lofty, and upon reaching yet another crushed hyoid bone narrated in nearly identical language. “The Part About the Crimes” blurred into one long sentence, the senseless interlude buried within the book I remembered. My boredom de-animated the book itself, forcing me into the same complicity every character exhibits: ignoring the names, ignoring the women killed, ignoring the heart of the book, ignoring the oasis of horror amidst personal boredom.
Only upon subsequent rereads did I see what was so obvious the entire time. Bolaño may be vehemently uninterested in solving his detective tales, but he tells you where to look. In the words of one character: “No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them.” This stretch of the book is where its heart beats. In these pages, Bolaño has staged a trial where the adversary is our own boredom—not as a thing to accept or extinguish, but a force to surmount. We may only achieve this feat through slow, careful reading. Fixed attention, and a steady gaze. At a time when reading can be so speed and stats-focused—numeric reading goals and if it’s not logged on Goodreads does it even matter?—2666 requires a different method, one of genuine study, poring over the same page, building diagrams of reference and character, unhurried, measured. Maybe it is the type of book to which one must devote an entire year. Or at the very least, never read on a bike.
In a quiet scene from “The Part About the Crimes,” a fortune teller sighs, “facing boredom head-on was an act of bravery,” and warns that when she did it she saw “terrible things in the face of boredom.” I have read the book several times now and still know very little about it. But what I do know is this: I would rather choose to be brave than bored. So now, cycling across the city, instead of music or audiobooks, I try to read my input machine. Taxi; NYPD officers handing a ticket to a halal cart owner; a dog strays on its leash; a toddler steps into traffic. Red light. I try to read the ambience all around, the disparate scraps, no matter how terrible, so I can tweak my handlebars at just the right moment, zipping past the taxi just before it can door me. Boredom, as with the door, is not necessarily death, just as it is not necessarily life. Boredom is something more intricate playing between the two. It is here and then it is not, its flicker shattering the difference, and beyond that, a fragment of courage where it vanished.
Photo credit: James Schwartz (Flickr / CC BY-ND 2.0)