nblinks

Death to Interesting! Well maybe not fully. For a while now I've tried to refrain from the i-word, mainly because it's often a bit lazy -- saying "oh did you see that article? It was very interesting" saves us the trouble of coming up with any sort of specific description. But more than that, it also exempts us from aesthetic and (more importantly) moral judgement -- allowing us to like something without having to explain why we like it, what makes it worthy of our attention.

There's a quote from Walker Percy's novel Lancelot where the narrator notes that in the past things and acts were judged on a continuum of Good and Bad, but now it seems like the moral scale runs instead from Interesting to Boring. Granted, the character who says it is something of a psychopath but still ...

And then there's this, from Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor:

The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses. "I look pale," said Byron, looking into the mirror. "I should like to die of consumption." Why? asked his tuburcular friend Tom Moore, who was visiting Byron in Patras in February 1828. "Because the ladies would all say, 'Look at that poor Byron, how interesting he looks in dying.'" Perhaps the main gift to sensibility made by the Romantics is not the aesthetics of cruelty and the beauty of the morbid (as Mario Praz suggested in his famous book), or even the demand for unlimited personal liberty, but the nihilistic and sentimental idea of "the interesting."

So there you have it, the condensed qualities of the interesting-obsessed: laziness, amorality, nihilism, and sentimentality. Take your pick.

[via This American Life's episode 97, "Death to Wacky"]