Boredom, ennui, the tedium of life, melancholy, and loneliness

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            Days became very long for me, too long. As beautiful and spectacular as life is, real life, I would end up just waiting for night to come and for sleep to take me out of it. This is a disastrous psychosis one might suppose, and yet seen from a different angle one could call this condition a form of mature boredom, for there was always something about existence in the manifest which made it all a great deal of work for me, and I wished that the work would be over, because the torpor of the spirit, slowed down to the dragging speed of matter, was far too slothful for me.

The arduous tedium of life would come upon me as the afternoon drew to a close, and I had finished editing and writing. About this time of day the students would be coming home from school, and the working people were returning from work, and I had been with myself all day, and I was finally tired of myself.

And in the apartment next door there would be some talking, and eating, and soon the television would be turned on. And I would still be sitting there, caring neither to stay nor go. I would turn and look out the window at life raging on, of which I had no real part, except to be crushed and mangled, and rescued by the night. All I sought was rest. So I would wait, and then lie down, and try to sleep, and hope it would come easy that night. It was not that I was tired. I was only going to sleep because I was tired of being awake... because I was tired of being.

            All those endless years in which I sat alone in small rooms, or broken hotels, cursing, and sighing, and trying to come to terms with it all. Nobody sat with me, as I died every night another death, until there was nothing left there to die. Nobody knew me. No one knew how many nights I sat alone, drinking, and thinking. No one knew the sorrow, and joy, and wonder which sustained me on those nights, alone. No one knew me, and I knew no one.

I wondered if others were like me, if everyone were like me perhaps, and the whole show of distraction and entertainments were merely ways of disguising our melancholy. I wondered if there were too many of us, too many minds, too many losses, and too many people, some who would avoid, some who would find, the same type of loneliness as I, which was the closest we would ever get to ourselves, and yet the farthest away we would be from all others.

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These fragments and quotes are taken from the unpublished writings of Jack Haas, selected from the notebooks 1990-2005.