Noia is the result of a fortuitous chain of connections between dissimilar things, on one hand the boredom of Leopardi and Heidegger, on the other the unexpected encounter, in the galleries of the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, with Antonio Colantonio’s Saint Jerome in his Study (1444), in which the saint removes a thorn from a lion’s paw. In the gesturing between the saint’s hands and the lion’s paws I felt I had finally captured the crystalline image I had long been searching for of a profound boredom, as described by the poet and the philosopher, sensing an analogy between the animal’s stupor and the inner state of boredom itself. Boredom is considered a potency, as the fundamental mood that characterises the human animal and without which life, thought, and philosophy would not be possible. Leopardi speaks of boredom as happiness in its purest form, always in potency of course, and Heidegger of ultra-potency. The German philosopher examines boredom at length in order to understand what world means for human beings, and in doing so draws a distinction between the environment of the animal and the world of the human: the animal lives in an environment in the sense that it has no relationship with entities as such but only insofar as they function as disinhibitors, that is, solely and exclusively with those that act as activators of its specific instincts; things therefore escape the animal in their essence: it is stunned by its environment, absorbed into it and driven ceaselessly by a multiplicity of instincts. The human being, by contrast, lives in a world, or rather is the constructor of their own world because, unlike the animal, they lack specialised instincts and have no environment that envelops them like a prosthesis. In the mood of boredom, however, the human being is revealed a relationship with the world that resembles that of the animal with its environment: in this state of mind there is a withdrawal of the world as such, entities recede because they have nothing left to say to us and leave us empty. The world retreats leaving us hollow and time, which seems to stand still, enchants and ensnares us in its disarticulated essence, but it is precisely in this withdrawal, in this condition of inactivity, that time itself makes its possibilities visible and confronts us with all that lies unused.