Aesthetic Realism Asks:
WHY ARE YOUNG MEN BORED?
By Jeffrey Carduner

The thing I learned through my study of Aesthetic Realism is that I had a desire, a hope to be bored, to see reality, as Mr. Siegel once described in me: "as a sucked orange." And in The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, he explains: 

From an early age, I also had the idea that I should get things. As the first son, I got a good deal of praise, and received lots of presents. When I liked Hopalong Cassidy, I was given a full leather suit with the hat and guns. I had many English lead soldiers, beautifully crafted and painted. But I never thought about the people who had carefully molded the lead, made the arms which could move and which I thoughtlessly broke off, or the people who had put their lives into researching the authentic uniforms, and had meticulously painted the richly colored red and blue coats. I thought was they were mine to do with what I wanted, and I soon lost interest. I was often restless and sulky. 

This desire to grab things and not respect them made me feel sated by the age of 10. I also got the feeling--through conversations around the dinner table with my father and grandfather about business dealings--that other people existed to serve us, make money for us, that we had a right to accumulate things from their work. This contemptuous, acquisitive way of dealing with people, I was to learn, is the very basis of our unjust and now failed economy, which sees a human being in terms of how much profit his labor can make for oneself. I had no idea how much this taking the life out of people, made me feel old and tired before I was 20. 

In a class of 1996, Ellen Reiss asked me, "Do you think the profit system made for boredom in you?" It did. And she continued: "A person either sees things in terms of being owned by him or known by him. I think that your life was hurt enormously by the profit system as you were growing up." Miss Reiss was right. Before I was even in my teens, I felt I had seen it all. 

The one thing that would really get me excited and made my life not boring was gambling--and I was driven by it. When we went bowling it wasn't enough to bowl--I had to bet a nickel a pin. School was so boring that between classes, in the boys' room, as others would secretly smoke, friends and I would throw quarters against the wall, and the winner was the one who got his quarter closest to the wall. My colleague, Robert Murphy recently reminded me that at lunchtime, we would even bet on who could slide his quarter nearest to the edge of the table. Later, poker became a mania, and I would play for high stakes into the night. My blood would race when, on the seventh card, my two jacks and two sevens became a full house and I beat out everybody else, and saw how faces dropped. Afterwards, I felt dull and listless, and couldn't understand why. 

Then in 1969, on a hot Saturday afternoon, I was sitting with friends after a sailboat race on Long Island sound, and though we looked out on a beautiful harbor with white sails against blue water, I shuddered to myself as we had the conversation we had had a hundred times before: what are we going to do tonight? I was 24 years old, had been to many places, but I was bored to death. Same people, same places, same moves. "Well," I said, "I think I'm going to take up the invitation of this girl I met, to go to a program in New York City about Aesthetic Realism." Little did I know that painful, bored existence that I lived would thankfully end forever. I was to meet the woman I would fall in love with and marry, Aesthetic Realism consultant Devorah Tarrow. She was excited about something and this affected me deeply--she wasn't bored by things the way I and everyone I knew was. And that day I met the important philosophy Aesthetic Realism, founded by Eli Siegel.  Some time later, in an Aesthetic Realism class, Mr. Siegel explained what had pained me so much of my life. He said: 

Continued: click here for part 2