Sublime = boring?Am thinking more

Sublime = boring?

Am thinking more of the trip to NY. We went to the opera to see Les Troyens (thank you mom in law), which was very good but very long and somewhere in the 3rd and 4th act I was having a long, slow train of thought like:

"Hmm, they've been doing the same thing for a long time. They're still doing it. Wonder if this is what it would really be like to be a king and have people dancing around specifically to entertain you all day. Entertaining, and luxurious, but kind of boring. Wonder if Berlioz meant it to be boring? Because it's all so slow you have a lot of time to think about all the ideas about what's happening. It's true, kings and queens are often bored when you read about them. Also love and happiness are boring. Wait, suddenly it's not boring, it's sublime. I keep thinking of words like "sublime" and "wafted", but also somehow still the word "boring". They are singing and the music is really like some kind of fairyland timeless ethereal music. [ I space out with no thoughts at all for quite a while on the wafty sublimeness] Oh man, this seat is uncomfortable. If kings are bored do they have to act like they're still regally pleased? The music and the voices are just blending together in some weird unearthly way. Man, love and slothful ease is boring. Oh, wait, it's all sublime again. In any normal play or opera or movie something would be happening with the plot and there would be no time to savor this strange complexity that maybe I just can't even quite understand because I am not able to concentrate and have not been smoking opium like apparently Berlioz was."

Then they're going to start a new song and I'm wondering if anything will happen in the plot.

Dido: Come, Jopas, sing for us your gentle pastoral song of the fields.
Jopas: Oh, the gentle golden fields of grain waving in the breeze, thank you, blessed Ceres!
(repeat for 1/2 hour)

Fuck! No plot twist. Sublime. Boring. Sublime. Boring!

In Act One I began crying as soon as Cassandra struck a pose, before she even opened her mouth. Then again when she pulled the curtain as if what was about to happen in Troy was so dreadful she couldn't bear to look. Dido did the same curtain pull move in the end. Then standing up on the pyre (a pile of presents from Aeneas) she lifted up the sword she was about to stab herself with and she was all radiant and gold and white and awful like a perfect "Queen of Swords" tarot card.

It was all the ultimate triumph of atmosphere over plot.

A good silly moment to be emulated for the rest of my life, the god or ghost or whatever it was appearing over the boring love scene with arm dramatically upraised and going "Italy!! Italy!!! Italy!!!!" in a tremendous doom filled voice.

I was going mentally "A toilet! A toilet! A toilet!" because it had been a couple of hours and if you leave for the bathroom they don't let you back in. It is possible that Berlioz had nightmares about people like me, but I really enjoyed his opera...