One of the strange things about being married to Mrs Rollo is that although we grew up in vastly different countries and have a fair amount of interest in things with no overlap whatsoever, is that there are a lot of internal logic processes running through our brains which are scarily similar. Those processes engage years and cogs which trip other shafts and gears, which then start other entire processes spinning madly at a hundred thousand revs a minute.
This morning as I was about to head off to work, I was told:
"My brain made up a new word. 'Persistediums' - it is persistent and 'tedium'"
Now I have no idea what is actually going on inside her brain because that is rather like looking inside a theoretical black box and I also have no idea exactly what any brain including my own does inside that magical land that JM Barrie in 'Peter Pan' called that land half way between awake and sleep¹ but I very much appreciate and recognise the kind of process which chucks words and concepts together as though two blobs of plasticene were being fired at each other out of two cannons and we collect the results from off of the floor.
This is a portmanteau and having had this new idea blob arrive in my own brain, I want to examine it.
Persistedium is different in principle to ennui. Ennui is that kind of listless apathy which is related to boredom but not exactly congruous. Ennui kind of became fashionable among the idle rich in that period after Napoleon but before the next Second French Republic when it was simultaneously a luxury to have nothing to do and yet be bored by it. For a concept as nebulous as ennui, it is surprisingly well documented. Persistedium though, implies something a little bit more insidious.
Tedium is not boredom. Tedium is like having a shard of glass stuck in your heel for several months and because the sharpest point has been worn away, the sharpest pain has been dulled. Tedium is a rolling kind of pain which is caused by a constant sameness of circumstance with something consistently unpleasant. Tedium is akin to the Sisyphean task of rolling a giant rock up a hill forever; only to have it roll back down again.
Persistediums implies that there are more than one and that they are perhaps countable and that whatever the things in question are, they do not go away. Closely related is the concept of repetedium; which are these things happening again and again and again.
Due to the circumstances of my youth, I have ended up as a reasonably pessimistic but yet begrudgingly cheerful character whom Honoré De Balzac would have deemed as a 'grinning idiot'. To be fair, the fact that a lot of weeks look exactly the same is not really all that painful or tedious for me. For me to claim that I have either pain or tedium in life would be hideously churlish indeed.
However there are people in life whose own bodies are constant reminders of pain; people for whom circumstance has dealt them familial or other social pain, and people who have to deal with the consequences of other people's pain (think of carers, social workers, people in really awful jobs, and parents of worrisome children etc.). For all of these people, the pain of the things that life has thrown at them can be both rolling and sharp, and either persistent or repetitious.
Those things might very well be the result of something that the person inflicted upon themselves or not. They might be identifiable or not, they might be countable and discreet or not, they may even be nebulous and/or legion. As opposed to pain, persistediums and repetediums are things that occur more than once and as with all pains, not only do they demand to be felt² they will take up and demand all available resources to be felt. Also, precisely because the centre of the observable universe is exactly from the point of the instrument doing the observation, the persistediums and repetediums of someone else are ultimately unknowable. They may be able to sort of describe a general impression that they have but you can never actually feel them.
Perhaps one of the biggest acts of cruelty that you can perform on someone else, apart from actually inflicting pain upon someone else, is to discredit and deny that their pain exists. Someone else's persistediums and repetediums are absolutely not tangible but they are real. I mean technically someone could be lying about their experience but in general because every one of us are egoists who are the centre of our own observable universes, that's generally not the case.
Whether or not it is an unpleasantness caused by something physical or perhaps as the result of relational issues with other people, the fact that this is a repetedium or a persistedium implies that at some point, the person making the complaint which will be legitimate most of the time, will either lose their patience, cool, or temper. Nobody can live with a repetedium or persistedium forever. We all eventually break.
The thing is that as social creatures who are meant to live in community, a great many of these can soothed with that most rare of commodities: kindness. Be kind to someone with a persistedium or repetedium. Obviously they would prefer it to go away but if that's simply not possible, then a burden carried upon many legs is better than one carried by just two.
¹"You know that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming? That's where I'll always love you. That's where I'll be waiting."
- Peter, Peter Pan³; or, the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up (1911)
²"That's the thing about Pain, it demands to be felt."
- John Green, The Fault In Our Stars (2012)
³Peter Pan wore greem tights and could fly. The last time I wore green tights and tried to fly... they threw me off the aircraft.
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