Life & Wisdom Quote by John Berryman

Berryman opens with a blunt confession and then snaps the confession shut. "Life, friends, is boring" lands like a heresy disguised as small talk: the commaed address makes it sound convivial, even toast-like, while the claim itself threatens the whole social contract. Then comes the twist that gives the line its bite: "We must not say so". Not "it isn’t", not "cheer up", but a command to keep the dread off the record.

The intent isn’t to wallow; it’s to expose the policing mechanism that surrounds boredom. Berryman is pointing at a cultural etiquette that demands performance - enthusiasm as civic duty, pep as proof you’re mentally and morally sound. The subtext is shame. Boredom is treated as a personal failing ("you’re ungrateful", "you lack imagination") rather than an honest report on modern life’s repetitions, its dead hours, its emotional flatlining. So you learn to translate your boredom into acceptable languages: busyness, irony, complaint with a punchline.

Context matters: mid-century American life, with its prosperity and its private alienations, and Berryman’s own wrestling with depression and addiction. In The Dream Songs, the speaker is always half-acting, half-confessing, trapped between the urge to tell the truth and the need to stay lovable. This line crystallizes that tension: boredom as existential fact, silence as survival strategy.

It works because it’s both intimate and accusatory. "Friends" invites you in; "must not" implicates you. The poem doesn’t just diagnose boredom - it shows how quickly we collaborate in hiding it.