A Loss of Interest

by James Tadd Adcox

On a certain day, difficult to identify, he found himself uninterested. He had been uninterested in this or that individual topic before, though in the past it had always felt, hadn’t it, as though it were a passing thing, a mood, part of his mental weather, to be replaced in several hours or a day or a span of days at most with the sense of being moderately interested or vaguely interested or a good deal interested, as the case might be, in the same way one might find oneself irritable or sleepy without lapsing therefore into undue concern that one was now categorically irritable or sleepy as a person. On the whole he imagined himself as an individual of few talents but with deep and wide-ranging interests; and if he were to identify in himself a talent, it was his ability to become interested in those things which the world presented to him, to pick up a cup and find in himself a wonder about the universe of cups, their manufacture, their materials, how the craft of cupmaking had degenerated at a certain historical moment when confronted by the rising might of the industrial cupmaking concerns and what effect that had on key world-historical events involving cups. This was often a source of amusement for his friends, many of whom were talented but did not have his propensity towards interest; they would discover that he was researching bivalent chemical compounds, or polymorphism in the wombat, or the history and economics of cupmaking, even that he was writing an article about it which he would tinker with endlessly without ever assuring himself it was sufficiently completed; and the friend or friends in question, who might possess a talent in business administration, or software design, or watercolor painting, and in many cases spent large portions of the day involved in that for which they possessed said talent, would express surprise and something like admiration for this interest which they did not in the least share, nor want to; and while he might be tempted, faced with such admiration, to delve into the details of his interest, wanting to discuss for example the ways in which cupmaking changed between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries in reaction to the invention and perfection of new forms of glassware, he knew from previous experience that what was interesting about him for others was the fact of his interest, that someone, namely him, found the history and economics of cupmaking interesting, but his friends’ interest in his interest did not extend in the slightest to the realm of the thing itself. And just as he experienced his prior interest as though it were emanating from the things in which he was interested, from the cup or the bivalent compound or wombat polymorphism in question, the sudden and absolute lack of interest which had recently taken hold of him felt as though it were an emptying out of some quality that had previously inhered in the world itself, as though he had woken up one day in a room which appeared at a glance to be his own but in which each of the beloved objects had been replaced with carefully crafted styrofoam duplicates. It was impossible under such conditions to continue the research which had engaged him before his sudden lack of interest, and not only because he no longer felt any desire to; if he sat himself down at his desk, for example, and told himself that he was simply going to soldier through, he quickly realized that he had no basis on which to follow this thread of the topic rather than that thread, or to investigate this question rather than another; and the number of threads and topics being in principle infinite, he discovered that his research, which had once allowed him to concentrate pleasantly on the individual facts of a thing without asking, or at least without asking seriously, what his investigation of this or that individual detail was for, suddenly gave way to the great chasm of mortality itself, making plain to him the impossibility of knowing in sufficient detail any given thing in the finite years he had remaining, however many or few they might be; and even if he could somehow increase these years, through exercise, for example, or healthier sleep habits, or a reduction in the number and frequency of hard candies he consumed while engaged in his research (he was up, before his sudden loss of interest, to three bags a day), it remained unlikely, or rather impossible, that he might come to know any given thing in it wholeness; and even if through as-yet unknown scientific advances, perhaps involving one of the bivalent chemical compounds which he had previously researched, it became possible to extend one’s life to hitherto unsuspected length, to double or treble it or keep it going, horrifyingly, until the explosion of our sun or the heat death of the universe, nevertheless given that such a life was, as how could it not be, limited, it would fall short before the essentially limitless number of threads or questions which presented themselves in his sudden uninterestedness as possible routes to be taken in the investigation of any one thing. When his talented friends asked him now what he was “looking into,” as they often put it, he would say “Nothing at all”; and when they, in disbelief, pressed him on this, he would find himself going into the sort of detailed explanation of his uninterestedness that he would have previously avoided regarding the topics of cupmaking or wombat polymorphism or compound bivalence or the language of flowers in medieval France or the ancient Greek precursors to the novel or semaphore alphabets, and in so doing boring his friends utterly, driving them to change the subject or invent reasons why they had to break off the
conversation, reactions which offended him significantly more than his friends’ previous disinclination regarding the details of cupmaking or wombat polymorphism etc, since at that time he had only been talking about this or that particular interest, whereas now in examining the details of his absolute uninterestedness he had reached finally the natural end of all interest, which is to say, an interest so profound and encompassing so as to be an interest in nothing at all.

James Tadd Adcox's work has appeared in Granta, 3:AM Magazine, and Barrelhouse, among other places. He's a founding editor at the literary magazine Always Crashing and author, most recently, of Denmark: Variations, a collection of sixty sets of intstructions for variations on the play Hamlet.