Rogueish

Boredom is a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colorful of silks. In his fabric we wrap ourselves when we dream. We are at home then in the arabesques of its lining. But the sleeper looks bored and gray within his sheath. And when he later wakes and wants to tell of what he dreamed, he communicates by and large only this boredom. For who would be able at one stroke to tum the lining of time to the outside? Yet to narrate dreams signifies nothing else. And in no other way can one deal with the arcades—struc­tures in which we relive, as in a dream, the life of our parents and grandparents, as the embryo in the womb relives the life of animals. Existence in these spaces flows then without accent, like the events in dreams. Flânerie is the rhythmics of this slumber. In 1839, a rage for tortoises overcame Paris. One can well imagine the elegant set mimicking the pace of this creature more easily in the arcades than on the boulevards.

― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (D2a,1)