Date: 2008-03-25 20:42 Subject: In Defense of Boredom Security: Public

I've been thinking of this a lot lately, then amand_r pointed this article in the Boston Globe out to me, and it's crystallized my thought on much of what I'd have to say on the topic.

I'm not a technophobe, in my defense, but I grew up in a time before cell phones, internet, iPods; my children will quickly verify that to complain that they were 'bored' was always the gateway...to the unexpected.

I'm glad for all those unfilled moments of my life, times when I was left on my own, summers when I was expected to fill my days productively. (I wasn't totally left to myself, or course, but having been given some direction and possibilities, was expected to choose wisely.)

The article explores what happens when there is no chance to be bored, what the mind does when every single moment is artificially filled with something. What is lost, what is sacrificed, how we can reclaim this lost art...being bored.

Here's a teaser from the article. Hopefully it'll pull you in, because it's thought-provoking and hopefully will resonate with many of you.

In one of the most famous scenes in literature, for instance, boredom takes time. Marcel Proust describes his protagonist, Marcel, dunking a madeleine cookie into his teacup.

"Dispirited after a dreary day with the prospect of a depressing morrow, I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake," Proust wrote. "And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory . . . I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal."

Marcel's senses are recalibrated, his experiences deepened, and the very nature of memory begins to reveal itself. But it is only through the strenuous process of clearing his mind and concentrating that his thoughts begin to unfurl completely, immersing him in memory. Had Marcel been holding a silver clamshell phone in his hand instead of the delicately scalloped cookie, perhaps he could have quieted the boredom with a quick game of cellphone Tetris. And had Proust come of age with an iPhone in his hand and the expectation that his entire world fit in his pocket, he may never have written his grandiose novel.

Read the entire article here...

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