The good column: Where is the lying cure?

“The world is just a temporary parade of cruel moments and long, desolate stretches where nothing happens except that you drink chicory coffee and whiskey and play cards,” it says at one point in the very good novel “Days Without End” by the Irish writer Sebastian Barry (born 1955), who, with this sentence, has managed to describe existence on this planet in a way that is as vivid and concise as possible.

As far as I can see, no one has actually managed to drive out cruelty in humans, but at least coping with the long, dreary stretches of life could be made much more pleasant if people hadn’t been constantly fixated on doing something since the beginning of time to want. Unfortunately, the fact that “nothing happens” on these routes is not true at all! In reality, it is the human desire for activity that is the fundamental root of all evil. Because they are supposedly “bored,” the world’s population has resorted to all sorts of dispensable activities: committing human rights violations, waging wars, posting opinions on the Internet, talking loudly on the telephone in public. Let’s just say it openly: all of this could be avoided.

I therefore advise against not only stupid (playing cards) and nausea-inducing activities (drinking chicory coffee), but almost all of them, since doing most of them has bad consequences.

I’m not sure whether, in a better future, the relaxed enjoyment of boredom might not be preferable to incessant busyness. (Strictly speaking, the word “boredom” is just a derogatory and misleading term for “contemplation.”) The fact that NOTHING would actually HAPPEN would be the enchanting beauty. Unfortunately, humans are restless and restless. It starts in the morning: As soon as he rubs the last grain of sleep out of his eyes, he wants to get up. Perhaps work calls or other useless or irrelevant daily tasks need to be taken care of, which means that the morning is already contaminated by senseless busyness and hecticness and is spent in miserable toil.

Instead of remaining in a half-lying, half-sitting position and in a state of calm and peaceful serenity, being quiet and consciously doing nothing at all – which, considering the likely course of the day in question, would undoubtedly be for the benefit of everyone -, the People have the ineradicable will to be busy: morning personal hygiene (waste of energy and water, pollution of the environment through soap residue and cosmetic packaging), drinking coffee for breakfast (exploitation of the trikont by large corporations, current annual sales of 386 billion), driving to work and back (acceleration of the climate catastrophe due to Emission of CO₂, nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and diesel soot particles, noise pollution), doing the weekly shopping (consumerism, more packaging waste) – this goes on and on in an endless loop. And the marmot greets you every day.

The poet Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) knew better: “Doing nothing at all is the most difficult occupation and at the same time the one that requires the most spirit.” Even the writer Arno Schmidt (1914-1979), otherwise known for his real obsession with work, noted: While he was working on his novel “Julia, or the Paintings” (which has remained a fragment for a reason), he wrote on a piece of paper: “I just have enough sense to do nothing at all in an emergency.” In an emergency! To this day, nothing is known about whether the two of them ever suffered from “boredom” during their lifetimes.

It is the great heroes of world literature who serve as guiding figures and guide our actions: the divine Oblomov, who sees no serious reason to leave his bed and whose main activity is his afternoon nap; the touching Hans Castorp, who manages to free himself from the terror of the times by means of an extensive “bed cure” in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps and thus evade the bourgeois obsession with efficiency; the wise writer Bartleby, whose mantra “I’d rather not” is not a sign of refusal to live, but rather a central intention to lead a successful life in which contemplation and leisure form the central pillars. By doing nothing, they set a shining example for us.

One thing is certain: regardless of this, it doesn’t hurt to read the works of Ivan Goncharov (1812-1891), Thomas Mann (1875-1955) and Herman Melville (1819-1891). (Even if you then no longer do nothing.)