Spirit. Perhaps.
Tasso. There is no perhaps in the matter. But why is it that we live? I mean, why do we consent to live?
Spirit. How should I know? You yourselves ought to know better than I.
Tasso. I assure you I do not know.
Spirit. Ask some one wiser than yourself. Perhaps he may be able to satisfy you.
Tasso. I will do so. But certainly, the life that I lead is an unnatural state, because apart from my sufferings, ennui alone murders me.
Spirit. What is ennui?
Tasso. As to this, I can answer from experience. Ennui seems to me of the nature of atmosphere, which fills up the spaces between material bodies, and also the voids in the bodies themselves. Whenever a body disappears, and is not replaced by another, air fills up the gap immediately. So too, in human life, the intervals between pleasures and pains are occupied by ennui. And since in the material world, according to the Peripatetics, there can be no vacuum, so also in our life there is none, save when for some cause or other the mind loses its power of thought. At all other times the mind, considered as a separate identity from the body, is occupied with some sentiment. If void of pleasure or pain, it is full of ennui; for this last is also a sentiment like pleasure and pain.
Spirit. And, since all your pleasures are like cobwebs, exceedingly fragile, thin and transparent, ennui penetrates their tissue, and saturates them, just as air penetrates the webs. I believe ennui is really nothing but the desire of happiness, without the illusion of pleasure and the suffering of pain. This desire, we have said, is never completely satisfied, since true pleasure does not exist. So that human life may be said to be interwoven with pain and ennui, and one of these sentiments disappears only to give place to the other. This is the fate of all men, and not of yourself alone.
Tasso. What remedy is there for ennui?