Three steps to ennui in Sydney (and three reasons not to follow them)
Today Milan Kundera died; and forty years ago, a different student entered his world of middle-aged fever-dreams.
6:00, train stopped at St Peters, a guards’ mumble, an indefinite delay. The doors are open, and the few passengers look out as if wondering if we should walk. It’ll only take an hour, according to Google Maps. The wind snorts. It shakes the azure from its icy journey on the doorway. The conversation between me and my friend suddenly becomes animated; eye contact is much easier when we’re shaking our heads in disgust. I share an anecdote of when a British tourist exclaimed how cold it was, and cringe that it makes me feel proud. The night seems to recede from view; like true Sydneysiders we silently wonder if we should have stayed home and torrented instead.
5:00, dinner in a suburban pub, oversized schnitzel washed down with undersized beer. Undersized because the obligatory pub pool plays like a procedure, surgeons holding their breaths with every half-centimeter movement. We talk about what’s on and confess neither of us coughed up for Vivid. We talk about where to go, movies, bars, gigs, and decide on looking around Town Hall, which means we’ll probably do the same thing as right now at city prices. There’s an awkward pause as we realise we’ve got a whole night ahead of us. We don’t dislike each other; but we can feel the cold disappointment of having nothing, nowhere better to go. A story notification, a flash of green and blue, and we walk to the station, holding our jackets close.
4:00, on my bed, the window is open and the clouds reach through to drift over my blue walls. Lost in Translation, finished, lies beside me, and my eyes feel sticky from endlessly scrolling on my warm phone. A word appears suddenly; ennui. When did boredom, frustration, FOMO, become something like that? But it fits well. Ennui doesn’t come quietly in Sydney; the feverish buzzing of five million people and five million phones is enough to send anyone mad. Perhaps there’s something in that; ennui comes from the Latin inodiare – “to make loathsome,” to annoy. I look across at my bookshelves, and out the window, wondering why I can’t find the energy to do anything.
4:30, staring across the street, beige bricks covered by pale green roofs and a dangle of gum leaves lowing and tossing in the wind. Further on, a band of celadon marks the start of the National Park. I catch myself thinking of it as a prison fence, and, disgusted, look out again. I look and listen to the magpies playing their throat-strings, the mynahs yapping, the cockatoos screeching as they demolish another bin. Spellbound, I look and let my thoughts wander, and I remember childhood walks up steep, sandy hills, hands gripping scribbly bark, smiles squeezed like pearls out of tired, shaking knees. This gumtree bower my prison; I laugh, and reach for a new book.
5:30, in a street, the sunset bursting over the clouds’ outlines, painting them pink. Not pink like a Barbie, or like a Portuguese postcard; but that deep, old pink of this old continent, like petals caught in the moment they begin to wilt. We both turn and watch the silvery undertow murmur and hiss through the sky’s ocean. And there’s a memory of Coogee, of water heaving with weed, and the sky stuffed with clouds, caught in a breaker and thrown unceremoniously on the beach. The world surges with hissing grey. I catch my breath, we laugh, we dive back in. The train doors open.
6:30, the lights play in the black waves on the harbour, cutting its wood into shapes for the ink of night to enter into. I think back to the fallen spirits, the listless wandering of the cold wind, the ennui. Was it today? There’s a beauty in remembering your own dark moments; like the lights on the lapping waves, they’re a microcosm of life. Today Milan Kundera died; and forty years ago, a different student entered his world of middle-aged fever-dreams. And suddenly, as we walk and watch a boat chug ominously beneath the Bridge, under the weight of some party with stain-begging shirts illuminated against the night, I smile, and the ideas come flooding back.