Angst and Ennui
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday May 5th, 2002
***
I learned a new word this past week. It wasn’t an entirely new word -- I’d heard it a few times before -- but it wasn’t really part of my active vocabulary, and when I tripped over it while reading aloud a passage from Thoreau’s Walden, I realized that I wasn’t really certain what it actually meant either. Ordinarily, when I am reading to myself, I just skip over troublesome words like that; I can generally figure out what they mean from context, or, if I can’t, I simply assume that the word probably wasn’t that important to begin with, and move on. But sometimes I am forced look them up in a dictionary, especially if I am curious about the origin of the word, or any out-of-the-ordinary connotations the author may have intended by using that particular word in that particular context.
Unfortunately though, when I was trying to decide last summer how much of my library to ship to Nantucket, and how much to leave behind in Portland, my two favorite dictionaries: an unabridged Websters that was given to me by my mother as a High School graduation present, and the two-volume boxed Compact Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary that I received when I joined the Book of the Month Club for the first time many, many years ago (which came complete with its own magnifying glass so that I could actually read it), both failed to make the cut, and so I was compelled to go with Plan B. I asked Ted. Your very erudite Minister Emeritus thought for a moment, provided me with a precise, concise, to-the-point two-word definition, and then went home and looked it up in his Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, and phoned me back later that afternoon with a more thorough exposition.
The word in question, by the way, was “Ennui” -- which the OED defines as “The feeling of mental weariness and dissatisfaction produced by want of occupation or by lack of interest in present surroundings and employment.” It’s a French loan-word, related to the more familiar English word “annoy,” and although the word itself was unfamiliar to me, as someone who has spent the majority of his adult life either under-employed or in Graduate School, the sentiment of “disinterested lassitude” (or, in plain English, bored annoyance) to which it refers was certainly one that at times I have known intimately.
I attribute the fact that it has taken me 45 years to learn the definition of the word Ennui to the circumstance of having studied German in High School rather than French. German students do not suffer Ennui. German students are afflicted with Angst. Angst, (or if you grew up somewhere in the Midwest “Aay-ngst”), is one of those terrific, 35-cent words that seems to be on just about everyone’s lips these days, and for good reason. Angst means “anxiety,” “apprehension,” “insecurity” -- and it actually came into widespread use in the English language through the writings of the Danish Existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who used it as a technical term to denote “the generalized dread and anxiety which takes hold of an individual when they face the mystery of existence and the threat to that existence posed by the fact of death and the intimidating scale of the universe.” Anxiety in the face of our ultimate mortality -- that sure helps put a little Ennui into proper context, doesn’t it?
Angst and Ennui. The Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary Western culture. On the one hand the terrifying six-headed monster of our inevitable deaths, stripped by science of any comforting expectation of immortality, yet seasoned with a sense of alienation from a universe infinite in its vast emptiness, against which our own brief flickering of consciousness seems to shrink to insignificance; and on the other the relentless whirlpool of meaninglessness itself, the mundane tedium of day to day life which seems to repeat without end a monotonous cycle of working, sleeping, paying the bills and watching TV... or perhaps engaging in any one of a thousand other mindless entertainments intended to distract us from what Thoreau would have called the “quiet desperation” of contemporary existence. Angst and Ennui. Fear and Loathing. Anxious Bored Annoyance. We know, intuitively, that there must be more to life than this. But with so little time, in so vast a universe, where can we possibly begin to look?
Well, one obvious place is the Internet. Not long after talking with Ted it occurred to me that I could have simply typed the appropriate words into the Google search engine and come up with, literally, hundreds of links to dubiously relevant web pages. Did you know, for example, that “Ennui” was the “Word of the Day” on Monday November 29th, 1999? Or that near Loyola University in Chicago there is a coffee house called “The Ennui Cafe” which, according to the proprietors, is a “slightly subterranean Rogers Park cafe” featuring “simple, inexpensive food and drink,” but which, according to its customers, is run by “a bunch of over the hill Hippie Wannabes” who allow their dog to wander freely among the tables in violation of health department regulations, routinely gossip about other people behind their backs, and have a penchant for phoning the police on a regular basis to forcibly remove both unruly patrons and disgruntled former employees, of whom there is apparently no shortage.
But my personal favorite was a site called, simply, “The Grouchy Cafe” which contained a link to a page called “Favorite Teenage Angstbooks” featuring interesting reviews of contemporary young adult fiction in a variety of different categories, as well as additional links to the Powells Bookstore website in Portland, Oregon (my favorite bookstore, and where I now imagine that a lot of my personal library is going to eventually end up), as well as the cafepress.com’s own electronic store, where, for $13, one may purchase an 11 ounce dishwasher-and-microwave-safe ceramic coffee mug with the dictionary definition of Angst printed right on it. You can be certain I bookmarked that site on my browser.
My search also turned up the original FAQ’s (or Frequently Asked Questions) to a now-defunct internet newsgroup called “alt.angst.” And these actually turned out to be very helpful, in their own inimitable way. Let me just read you a little of this:
Q 11. What do cafes have to do with angst?”
A. Cafes are a “scene,” where you can wear black and loiter sullenly, breathe in the poisonous tobacco-and-clove smoke, and try not to look like the poseur you are. And of course you can imbibe lots of caffeine, which is an antidepressant.
Q 12. An antidepressant? Does it work?
A. Physiologically, yes. But it sharpens your perceptions, and you end up seeing facets of your hopeless existence more clearly, and you often end up more depressed than before. And so you get overwhelmed, and wander back to your lonely apartment, and go to bed. But of course it’s not possible to sleep anymore, so you lie awake in the dark thinking about death.
Having read all that, my own latent feelings of Angst and Ennui were starting to run a little strong, so I decided that maybe it was time for me to get away from my computer for awhile, and go out for a cup of coffee myself. I put on my black sweatshirt, attached Parker to her leash, and we wandered on over to the Bean for a tall, double Mocha with whipped cream. And then afterwards we walked down to the harbor, and back up Main Street, and when we got home to the Parsonage I gave her a treat and then we sat in the living room and I threw the squeaky-toy for her for about fifteen minutes while I tried to figure out where in the world I was going to find this week’s message of Hope and Redemption.
By this point, I’d pretty much stopped trying to figure out the meaning of life; I was just sorta hoping for a little light at the end of the tunnel, some small spark of optimistic inspiration that might carry me through for another week. Because that’s really what preaching is all about anyway. Let’s face facts. We’re probably not going to resolve any of the great mysteries of the Universe here. We’re all just hoping to hear a little something that will help us make it through another week, something to think about next Wednesday or Thursday night, when we are sitting awake in bed wondering what important thing we’ve forgotten about that needs our attention before next weekend. And it occurred to me that sometimes maybe a few distractions and a little honest denial aren’t such terrible things after all. Within reason, of course; I’m not talking here about the kind of blind, arrogant confidence that comes from a self-righteous fundamentalism combined with mindless material acquisition and consumption. But as I sometimes rationalize to myself, there’s denial and then there’s Denial...and sometimes the only reasonable thing to do is to turn a blind eye to the imponderables of life, in order to better focus on the things that are right in front of you.
And then I started thinking about that passage from Walden which got me started on this whole train of thought in the first place. Thoreau went to Walden Pond because he “wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if [he] could not learn what it had to teach....to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in [his] next excursion....” So he built himself a shack in the woods, and planted his beanfield, and counted his riches “in proportion to the number of things which he [could] afford to let alone.” And in his chapter on “Sounds,” he wrote:
"...A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always indeed getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted...."
And that was when I recalled that out in the kitchen I still had a sink full of dishes from the previous morning, and that my bed was still unmade from the night before, and decided that after all the thought I’d already given to the subject, whatever angst and ennui were still lingering in the back of my mind could easily wait another day....
So I may not have a profound, earth-shattering revelation to share with you this morning. But I do at least have clean kitchen counters, and a relatively-clean kitchen floor. And if you happen to find yourself sitting awake in bed late at night sometime this week, you might try thinking about this:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.....
“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” [Mt 6: 25-29; 34]
***
READING: “The History Teacher,” by Billy Collins
Trying to protect his students’ innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador’s hat?”
The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
at the Second Congregational Meeting House on Nantucket Island
Sunday May 5th, 2002
***
I learned a new word this past week. It wasn’t an entirely new word -- I’d heard it a few times before -- but it wasn’t really part of my active vocabulary, and when I tripped over it while reading aloud a passage from Thoreau’s Walden, I realized that I wasn’t really certain what it actually meant either. Ordinarily, when I am reading to myself, I just skip over troublesome words like that; I can generally figure out what they mean from context, or, if I can’t, I simply assume that the word probably wasn’t that important to begin with, and move on. But sometimes I am forced look them up in a dictionary, especially if I am curious about the origin of the word, or any out-of-the-ordinary connotations the author may have intended by using that particular word in that particular context.
Unfortunately though, when I was trying to decide last summer how much of my library to ship to Nantucket, and how much to leave behind in Portland, my two favorite dictionaries: an unabridged Websters that was given to me by my mother as a High School graduation present, and the two-volume boxed Compact Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary that I received when I joined the Book of the Month Club for the first time many, many years ago (which came complete with its own magnifying glass so that I could actually read it), both failed to make the cut, and so I was compelled to go with Plan B. I asked Ted. Your very erudite Minister Emeritus thought for a moment, provided me with a precise, concise, to-the-point two-word definition, and then went home and looked it up in his Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, and phoned me back later that afternoon with a more thorough exposition.
The word in question, by the way, was “Ennui” -- which the OED defines as “The feeling of mental weariness and dissatisfaction produced by want of occupation or by lack of interest in present surroundings and employment.” It’s a French loan-word, related to the more familiar English word “annoy,” and although the word itself was unfamiliar to me, as someone who has spent the majority of his adult life either under-employed or in Graduate School, the sentiment of “disinterested lassitude” (or, in plain English, bored annoyance) to which it refers was certainly one that at times I have known intimately.
I attribute the fact that it has taken me 45 years to learn the definition of the word Ennui to the circumstance of having studied German in High School rather than French. German students do not suffer Ennui. German students are afflicted with Angst. Angst, (or if you grew up somewhere in the Midwest “Aay-ngst”), is one of those terrific, 35-cent words that seems to be on just about everyone’s lips these days, and for good reason. Angst means “anxiety,” “apprehension,” “insecurity” -- and it actually came into widespread use in the English language through the writings of the Danish Existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who used it as a technical term to denote “the generalized dread and anxiety which takes hold of an individual when they face the mystery of existence and the threat to that existence posed by the fact of death and the intimidating scale of the universe.” Anxiety in the face of our ultimate mortality -- that sure helps put a little Ennui into proper context, doesn’t it?
Angst and Ennui. The Scylla and Charybdis of contemporary Western culture. On the one hand the terrifying six-headed monster of our inevitable deaths, stripped by science of any comforting expectation of immortality, yet seasoned with a sense of alienation from a universe infinite in its vast emptiness, against which our own brief flickering of consciousness seems to shrink to insignificance; and on the other the relentless whirlpool of meaninglessness itself, the mundane tedium of day to day life which seems to repeat without end a monotonous cycle of working, sleeping, paying the bills and watching TV... or perhaps engaging in any one of a thousand other mindless entertainments intended to distract us from what Thoreau would have called the “quiet desperation” of contemporary existence. Angst and Ennui. Fear and Loathing. Anxious Bored Annoyance. We know, intuitively, that there must be more to life than this. But with so little time, in so vast a universe, where can we possibly begin to look?
Well, one obvious place is the Internet. Not long after talking with Ted it occurred to me that I could have simply typed the appropriate words into the Google search engine and come up with, literally, hundreds of links to dubiously relevant web pages. Did you know, for example, that “Ennui” was the “Word of the Day” on Monday November 29th, 1999? Or that near Loyola University in Chicago there is a coffee house called “The Ennui Cafe” which, according to the proprietors, is a “slightly subterranean Rogers Park cafe” featuring “simple, inexpensive food and drink,” but which, according to its customers, is run by “a bunch of over the hill Hippie Wannabes” who allow their dog to wander freely among the tables in violation of health department regulations, routinely gossip about other people behind their backs, and have a penchant for phoning the police on a regular basis to forcibly remove both unruly patrons and disgruntled former employees, of whom there is apparently no shortage.
But my personal favorite was a site called, simply, “The Grouchy Cafe” which contained a link to a page called “Favorite Teenage Angstbooks” featuring interesting reviews of contemporary young adult fiction in a variety of different categories, as well as additional links to the Powells Bookstore website in Portland, Oregon (my favorite bookstore, and where I now imagine that a lot of my personal library is going to eventually end up), as well as the cafepress.com’s own electronic store, where, for $13, one may purchase an 11 ounce dishwasher-and-microwave-safe ceramic coffee mug with the dictionary definition of Angst printed right on it. You can be certain I bookmarked that site on my browser.
My search also turned up the original FAQ’s (or Frequently Asked Questions) to a now-defunct internet newsgroup called “alt.angst.” And these actually turned out to be very helpful, in their own inimitable way. Let me just read you a little of this:
Q 11. What do cafes have to do with angst?”
A. Cafes are a “scene,” where you can wear black and loiter sullenly, breathe in the poisonous tobacco-and-clove smoke, and try not to look like the poseur you are. And of course you can imbibe lots of caffeine, which is an antidepressant.
Q 12. An antidepressant? Does it work?
A. Physiologically, yes. But it sharpens your perceptions, and you end up seeing facets of your hopeless existence more clearly, and you often end up more depressed than before. And so you get overwhelmed, and wander back to your lonely apartment, and go to bed. But of course it’s not possible to sleep anymore, so you lie awake in the dark thinking about death.
Having read all that, my own latent feelings of Angst and Ennui were starting to run a little strong, so I decided that maybe it was time for me to get away from my computer for awhile, and go out for a cup of coffee myself. I put on my black sweatshirt, attached Parker to her leash, and we wandered on over to the Bean for a tall, double Mocha with whipped cream. And then afterwards we walked down to the harbor, and back up Main Street, and when we got home to the Parsonage I gave her a treat and then we sat in the living room and I threw the squeaky-toy for her for about fifteen minutes while I tried to figure out where in the world I was going to find this week’s message of Hope and Redemption.
By this point, I’d pretty much stopped trying to figure out the meaning of life; I was just sorta hoping for a little light at the end of the tunnel, some small spark of optimistic inspiration that might carry me through for another week. Because that’s really what preaching is all about anyway. Let’s face facts. We’re probably not going to resolve any of the great mysteries of the Universe here. We’re all just hoping to hear a little something that will help us make it through another week, something to think about next Wednesday or Thursday night, when we are sitting awake in bed wondering what important thing we’ve forgotten about that needs our attention before next weekend. And it occurred to me that sometimes maybe a few distractions and a little honest denial aren’t such terrible things after all. Within reason, of course; I’m not talking here about the kind of blind, arrogant confidence that comes from a self-righteous fundamentalism combined with mindless material acquisition and consumption. But as I sometimes rationalize to myself, there’s denial and then there’s Denial...and sometimes the only reasonable thing to do is to turn a blind eye to the imponderables of life, in order to better focus on the things that are right in front of you.
And then I started thinking about that passage from Walden which got me started on this whole train of thought in the first place. Thoreau went to Walden Pond because he “wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if [he] could not learn what it had to teach....to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in [his] next excursion....” So he built himself a shack in the woods, and planted his beanfield, and counted his riches “in proportion to the number of things which he [could] afford to let alone.” And in his chapter on “Sounds,” he wrote:
"...A man must find his occasions in himself, it is true. The natural day is very calm, and will hardly reprove his indolence. I had this advantage, at least, in my mode of life, over those who were obliged to look abroad for amusement, to society and the theatre, that my life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel. It was a drama of many scenes and without an end. If we were always indeed getting our living, and regulating our lives according to the last and best mode we had learned, we should never be troubled with ennui. Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour. Housework was a pleasant pastime. When my floor was dirty, I rose early, and, setting all my furniture out of doors on the grass, bed and bedstead making but one budget, dashed water on the floor, and sprinkled white sand from the pond on it, and then with a broom scrubbed it clean and white; and by the time the villagers had broken their fast the morning sun had dried my house sufficiently to allow me to move in again, and my meditations were almost uninterrupted...."
And that was when I recalled that out in the kitchen I still had a sink full of dishes from the previous morning, and that my bed was still unmade from the night before, and decided that after all the thought I’d already given to the subject, whatever angst and ennui were still lingering in the back of my mind could easily wait another day....
So I may not have a profound, earth-shattering revelation to share with you this morning. But I do at least have clean kitchen counters, and a relatively-clean kitchen floor. And if you happen to find yourself sitting awake in bed late at night sometime this week, you might try thinking about this:
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.....
“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” [Mt 6: 25-29; 34]
***
READING: “The History Teacher,” by Billy Collins
Trying to protect his students’ innocence
he told them the Ice Age was really just
the Chilly age, a period of a million years
when everyone had to wear sweaters.
And the Stone Age became the Gravel Age,
named after the long driveways of the time.
The Spanish Inquisition was nothing more
than an outbreak of questions such as
“How far is it from here to Madrid?”
“What do you call the matador’s hat?”
The War of the Roses took place in a garden,
and the Enola Gay dropped one tiny atom
on Japan.
The children would leave his classroom
for the playground to torment the weak
and the smart,
mussing up their hair and breaking their glasses,
while he gathered up his notes and walked home
past flower beds and white picket fences,
wondering if they would believe that soldiers
in the Boer War told long, rambling stories
designed to make the enemy nod off.
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 2:58 PM
