Nobel-Winning Poet Joseph Brodsky on the Remedy for Existential Boredom

“Try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain… passion’s frequent aftermath.”

Time is the most private place, and the loneliest — an interior chamber entirely inaccessible to another consciousness, no matter how proximate in space. In time, we are always alone — for time is the substance we are made of, but each of us is a sealed vial.

Our first great encounter with the interiority of time is the chi...