An Amulet Against the Ennui:
Overcoming Weariness in Seneca, Montaigne, and John Keats.
In the art of writing we expose our inner lives to examination; we bring hidden dragons to the surface and contend with them. We scrutinise our unwelcome thoughts on the page, and, in some sense, purify them. In this light, writing is a purgatorial practice.
Hello all, it is great to be able to write for you once again. As many of you may know, I have recently started a new full-time job, with working hours that are quite different from what I am used to. It has taken a little time to adjust, especially in also balancing my studies, but I am happy to get back into a regular writing routine once more. This article is centred around the French word, ennui: that feeling of listlessness or dissatisfaction in life, what Merriam Webster defines as a particular weariness or boredom. I quote from various philosophers and poets, and from some interesting theological sources too, where I felt the input of something more mystical may be more appropriate. I hope you enjoy.
The Romantic poet, John Keats, mentions the ennui in a letter to his sister, Fanny Keats, on May 1st, 1819:
O there is nothing like fine weather, and health, and Books, and a fine country, and a contented Mind, and Diligent-habit of reading and thinking, and an amulet against the ennui.Keats goes on to list a few more of his favourite pastimes, including having ‘two or three sensible people to chat with’, and ‘two or three spiteful folks to spar with […] and two or three numbskulls to argue with’. But the most striking phrase is his mention of an amulet against the ennui. An amulet is a an ornament, or some piece of jewellery that is worn in order to ward against evil, spells, and danger. For Keats, the ennui is a state of mind that needs to be guarded against. I think it is wise to distinguish here between leisure, or idleness (which is a good and necessary precondition for creativity and rest) and the kind of inactive or listless leisure and idleness which is spoken of by the philosophers.
The Roman philosopher and statesman, Seneca, provides a good definition of ennui in his Letters from a Stoic (the word comes form the Latin root, inodiare, ‘to make loathsome’):
[A] life spent viewing all the variety, the majesty, the sublimity in things around us can never succumb to the ennui: the feeling that one is tired of being, of existing, is usually the result of an idle and inactive leisure. (Letter LXXVII [77] Penguin edition, translated by Robin Campbell).
Tired of being. I think this summation highlights a dimension of the word that modern definitions, such as the one quoted earlier, fail to account for. Ennui is not to be found in a state of leisure, or well-earned rest, but in a deep weariness with life and human affairs that is almost existential in character. The bodily sensations associated with this inner idleness reminds me of the opening lines of Sylvia Plath’s poem, The Moon and theYew Tree (1961):
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
When the trees of the mind are black, and your inner life is cold and planetary, it can be helpful to remember the preconditions which may have contributed to this state. Seneca believed that surrounding yourself with the beauty and wonder of life, whether in nature, or simply in the curious happenings of everyday life, was helpful in combatting this feeling. And Keats said more or less the same thing. Similarly, Michel De Montaigne, in his essay on idleness, wrote of the necessity of keeping our minds occupied with helpful and productive thoughts in order to guard against an inactive leisure. In an effort to surmount an onset of melancholy after the death of his father, Montaigne retreated to his country estate for a life of contemplation. Upon settling down, however, he noticed that his mind did not cope well with this newfound idleness, leading to the following epiphany:
Just as fallow lands, when rich and fertile, are seen to abound in hundreds and thousands of different kinds of useless weeds so that, if we would make them do their duty, we must subdue them and keep them busy [...] so too with our minds. If we do not keep them busy with some particular subject which can serve as a bridle to reign them in, they charge ungovernably about, ranging to and fro over the wastelands of our thoughts. 
He continues, writing that ‘When the soul is without a definite aim she gets lost; for, as they say, if you are everywhere you are nowhere.’ Closing out the essay, Montaigne confesses his mistaken assumption that an inactive idleness would be conducive to a peaceful inner life. He was ‘determined to devote myself as far as I could to spending what little life I have left quietly and privately’, it seeming to him ‘that the greatest favour I could do for my mind was to leave it in total idleness’. However, to the contrary, Montaigne experienced a hazardous bout of mental instability and irritation. His mind ‘bolted off like a runaway horse,’ and ‘[gave] birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monstrosities’. Keats also wrote well of the feeling of existential displacement, of a struggle to find locality and centredness in a world of circumstances. In the third stanza of his Ode to a Nightingale (1819), he writes of ‘The weariness, the fever, and the fret’ of mortal life, and in a letter to his friend, Benjamin Bailey (22 Nov. 1817), he yearns ‘for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!’ One wonders whether Montaigne may have wished the same when passing through the dark and idle hours in his estate. But how did Montaigne combat these troubling thoughts? He took to writing:
so as to contemplate at my ease their oddness and their strangeness, I began to keep a record of them, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself.
In this respect, I find myself relating to Montaigne. In the art of writing we expose our inner lives to examination; we bring hidden dragons to the surface and contend with them. We scrutinise our unwelcome thoughts on the page, and, in some sense, when we write them down on paper, we purify them. In this light, writing is a purgatorial practice. I think that anybody who keeps a journal will understand what it is I am trying to say. In Catholic theology, purgatory is spoken of as ‘a cleansing fire’ (CCC #1031). In the New Testament, St. Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, mysteriously spoke of a person’s deeds being ‘revealed in fire’ at the end of their lives (1 Cor. 3:15). I think there is a similarity between the practice of writing, of attempting to clear up and articulate on the page the disorder of our lives, and the theological concept of purification, of which a ‘cleansing’ or ‘revealing’ fire is an appropriate metaphor. One might also think also of the sacred fire of the Zoroastrians, in which the light of God and the illuminated mind are represented in the flames.
We have heard from a few authors on the identification and management of the ennui, but I feel that the final stanza of Emily Brontë’s little poem, The Old Stoic, has particularly spoken to me as I write this:
Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
'Tis all that I implore;
In life and death, a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.I sincerely hope that, for anybody currently experiencing a deep-seated, inactive idleness, we might remember Brontë’s words, and find the ‘courage to endure’, however long it takes. I will finish with a clarion call from the late American literary critic, Harold Bloom, quoted from his book, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles (2020):
The great poems, plays, novels, [and] stories teach us how to go on living, even when submerged under forty fathoms of bother and distress. If you live ninety years you will be a battered survivor. Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can.
I'm glad that when I "rose up at dawn" today, your newsletter was the first thing I read. Thank you for this!
As I learned my mind was not always my friend, I learned that unless I give it a bone to chew on, it will chew on me.