Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind, by Patricia Meyer Spacks,  University of Chicago Press, 1995.

For each of us, the words we use unify images, associations, personal experiences, and values. Words are cultural artifacts that preexist our personal usages, establishing categories of interpretation. In actual discourse, each word is appropriated by each of us. Although words become personal, they retain enough from the social surround to construct a currency of communication. We know very well that in the psychoanalytic consultation room we explore the private and public meanings of our patients' words, discovering their latent, feelingful, and imaginative components that would otherwise remain outside awareness. We know this kind of exploration is often conducive to good therapy. Very often it is exploration of the commonest words, affectively inflected, that are most rich in meaning.

One word we frequently encounter is boredom. As a word like other words, boredom arises in our culture and is expressive of our culture, although it is also saturated with a person's own meaning. If we seriously interrogate the term as publicly conceived, as Patricia Meyer Spacks has done in this remarkable book, we find a trove of insight about much more than the affective state boredom presumes to define. We learn about the vicissitudes of a culture that enables boredom to function.

Spacks finds the term to arise in literary works—letters, essays, fiction, journalistic articles—in the mid-1700s at about the same time that leisure, interesting, and the pursuit of happiness also entered the culture's lexicon. Boredom has been used in various ways to describe a curious kind of victimization in which dreariness is paramount. It has been gendered as an unfortunate aspect of the female condition, rendered both as a moral failing and romantic achievement, blamed for aggression and cited as an impetus to creativity. Spacks declines any precise definition because she premises her work on the idea that boredom has had a multitude of definitions and has been made to perform all kinds of moral