When the poet and novelist Margaret Atwood was a child, she spent much of each year in the forests of northern Quebec. Her father was an entomologist—he kept an insect lab up there—and the family went along with him to the freezing wilds without electricity. “Places choose you,” the adult Atwood once said when asked how she decided where to locate a story. In a sense, that was also true of her early life. Her father chose the place, or the place chose her; she certainly didn’t choose it herself. What young person does?
Reading Atwood’s poem “Bored,” I imagine her in this period: a typical tween who “could hardly wait to get / the hell out of there.” She’s rolling her eyes about holding logs to saw, carrying wood, sitting in a boat. I’ll admit, I don’t really know if Atwood was writing about that time of her life. But I do know that she published this poem in 1994 after her father died in 1993, and here her memory feels saturated with grief. She’s gripped with the regret that so many of us know: What felt unbearably mundane in the moment reveals itself later to be precious, if only because it passed in the company of a loved one.
The person Atwood recalls, though, hasn’t left her with nothing. He’s taught her to see the world in all its minute detail. That loving attention turns the dirt under his fingernail, or the fabric on the boat’s seat, from dull to transcendent. This is the difference between humans and other animals, Atwood suggests: All types of creatures spend their days engaging, again and again, in the same existentially pointless tasks. But they don’t all stand back and observe themselves doing it. Of course, that’s exactly what Atwood is doing here: From the pain of loss and perspective, she’s created meaning.
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