“the word boredom did not enter the language until the eighteenth century. no one knows its etymology. one guess is that bore may derive from the french verb bourrer, to stuff. question: why was there no such word before the eighteenth century? . . . (f) is it because the self first had the means of understanding itself through myth, albeit incorrectly; later understood itself through religion as a creature of god; and now has the means of understanding the cosmos through positive science but not itself because the self cannot be grasped by positive science, and that therefore the self can perceive itself only as a ghost in a machine? how else can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?”
-walker percy, lost in the cosmos-