Research: Journals
The Journal
Past Issues
27.1
Michael Griffiths:
The Half-Life of Tedium: A LectureTedium, then, is a tedioactive metal, element number 88, most stable isotope 226, with a specific gravity roughly equal to the number of Horsemen of the Apocalypse (don’t leave out Famine, that’s the tricky one) plus the number, per legend, of Adolf Hitler’s testicles, plus the number of fingers I showed to the jerk who cut me off in traffic this morning—I expect you to be on your toes in this class, people. The main sources of raw tedium are Zairean carnotite and the pitchblende of prairie Canada, where the wind howls all day and it’s fearful cold and flat and there’s not much to do, frankly, but play hockey, which gets old after a while, and your feet feel like they might fall off from the chill, and the sound of skate blades scraping ice makes your back crawl something terrible. In such places may the ore of tedium be found.
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In 1898 Marie Curie discovered this rare element in uranium salts that had been plundered by Austrians for the manufacture of glass and then, as waste, passed on to her. It’s not as easy as it sounds to find boredom in the dreary metal tailings of glass-making; keep in mind that Madame Curie was a researcher of tremendous energy and perseverance, one prone to feats of lunatic fascination with dinky stuff nobody else could care about. This is the job of science, people—persistent, pointless fascination with the dinky stuff. Only after months of poring over the gray lumps in her damp and dark and drafty lab, twelve hours per day (and this was Paris, where she could have been dancing the cancan and drinking absinthe with Toulouse-Lautrec and sucking drawn butter out of snail shells), was she able, at last, to find the tedium ticking and lurking at the metal’s dull heart. Madame Curie seems not to have immediately recognized the dangers of her discovery.
Hear me out. In later days tedium, mixed with a phosphor such as zinc sulfide, was used in painting the luminous dials of clocks. Those who worked with it over long stretches and who licked the tiny brushes to get a more precise point paid for their foolish craftsmanship—such have always been the wages of taking care—by suffering horrendous deaths of apathy, which produced uncontrollable yawning and raw sores on their skin and made their hair fall out in hanks and then slowly wasted them away until the only things they could see, in their darkened sickrooms, were the bright, fatal numbers on their bedside clockfaces. In the final stages the sufferer would lie, palely aglow, on the sheets, watching without interest as the second hand swept whitely across the dial. This was known as tediation sickness or, in Latin, as radium vitae.
