"Boredom, for me, is properly a kind of insufficiency or inadequacy or scarcity of reality. To use a metaphor, reality, when I'm bored, has always had the disconcerting effect on me that a too-short blanket has on a sleeper ", on a winter night...Or my boredom resembles the frequent and mysterious interruption of the electricity in a house...Or my boredom could be defined as a disease of objects, consisting in a wilting or loss of almost repentant vitality...
In reality, as I sometimes thought, I didn't want to die so much as not to continue living this way."
In the prologue Alberto Moravia conducts an experiment that will then extend to the entire novel: capturing "boredom" by enclosing it in a metaphor, so that it is understood by everyone. Naturally the experiment is a "success": this novel is, in itself, the container of this definition.
It doesn't matter whether you call it "boredom" or "indifference", it is a feeling that dwells in our soul, it is an existential condition that never abandons us.
16 сен 2024
