We have been invited out somewhere for the evening. We do not need to go along. Still, we
have been tense all day, and we have time in the evening. So we go along. There we find the
usual food and the usual table conversation, everything is not only very tasty, but tasteful as
well. Afterward, people sit together having a lively discussion, as they say, perhaps listening to
music, having a chat, and things are witty and amusing. And already it is time to leave. The
ladies assure us, not merely when leaving, but downstairs and outside too as we gather to leave,
that it was really nice, or that it was terribly charming. Indeed. There is nothing at all to be
found that might have been boring about this evening, neither the conversation, nor the people,
nor the rooms. Thus we come home quite satisfied. We cast a quick glance at the work we
interrupted that evening, make a rough assessment of things and look ahead to the next day -
and then it comes: I was bored after all this evening, on the occasion of this invitation.
The evening is that with which we are bored, and simultaneously, what we are bored with here
is passing the time. In this boring situation, boredom and passing the time become intertwined
in a peculiar way. Passing the time creeps into our becoming bored and, diffused throughout the
whole situation, achieves peculiar proportions that it is never able to assume in the first form in
our discontinued and restless attempts. We find nothing boring, and yet passing the time takes
on such proportions that it lays claim to the whole situation for itself. Strange!
In this chatting along with whatever is happening we have, not wrongly or to our detriment, but
legitimately, left our proper self behind in a certain way. In this seeking nothing further here,
which is self-evident for us, we slip away from ourselves in a certain manner. [...] In this
casualness of leaving ourselves behind in abandoning ourselves to whatever there is going on,
an emptiness can form. Becoming bored or being bored is determined by this emptiness forming
itself in our apparently satisfied going along with whatever there is going on. [...] This
emptiness is a being left behind of our proper self.
We said the time we take for ourselves is our time. This time in its standing - this is our sealed
off having been and our unbound future, i.e., our whole time of our Dasein in a peculiar
transformation. In this transformed form our whole time is compressed into this standing 'now'
of the duration of the evening. This standing time - this is we ourselves; it is our self as that
which has been left behind with respect to its provenance and future. This standing 'now' can,
in its standing, precisely tell us that we have left it standing, which means, however, that it
precisely is not releasing us, but that our being bound to it is impressing itself upon us. The
standing 'now', the "during" of the evening in which the invitation endures, can manifest to us
as such precisely this being held in limbo, being bound to our time. [...] When, letting ourselves
go along with being there and part of things, we are thus set in place by the standing 'now' that
is our own, albeit relinquished and empty self, then we are bored.
My Soul . Why should the imagination of a man
Long past his prime remember things that are
Emblematical of love and war?
Think of ancestral night that can,
If but imagination scorn the earth
And intellect is wandering
To this and that and t'other thing,
Deliver from the crime of death and birth.
My self . Montashigi, third of his family, fashioned it
Five hundred years ago, about it lie
Flowers from I know not what embroidery -
Heart's purple - and all these I set
For emblems of the day against the tower
Emblematical of the night,
And claim as by a soldier's right
A charter to commit the crime once more.