The Uses Of Boredom

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31071, 28 May 1966, Page 12

The Uses Of Boredom

JN retrospect, (he summers of childhood are always golden, and the days, so it seems to the adult, were packed with a series of intense pleasures and equally intense tragedies. The

long periods of boredom in a pattern of life largely imposed by adults are quite forgotten.

This truth dawned on him. said Malcolm Hazell in a recent BBC broadcast, when he set out to write an autobiography of the first 12 years of his life, and realised that the incidents he could remember would barely have filled 12 months.

“We remember the highlights, the good and bad times; but the great stretches of boredom in betw«n escape us. Yet it is in these periods of tedium and routine that our character, our distinctive personality, is very largely formed. It is our reaction to boredom that settles what lines our development will follow.” For example, the young Tolstoy had escaped from the monotony of a daily round, unaltered even by the death of a much-loved ‘ mother, in the precocious contemplation of problems of moral philosophy. As a boy, Chatterton had escaped from the dull

routine of school life by writing verses. The novelist Richard Church had first picked up a book in a moment of acute boredom when he had wearied of his usual pre-bed-time game—and read 25 pages at a stretch.

Hazell suggested that a "sensation-soaked” brand of autobiography had given rise to a misconception about the growth of personality. “Events take on an overwhelming importance, and we have come to believe that we can gauge a man’s character by studying how he reacts to these events.

“We even assume that the character was made by the events, that without them there would be no recognisable personality. But the

character that reacts to those events developed before they took place. And I maintain that it was formed in those long. largely unrecorded stretches when events did not press ”

All his experience as a teacher, observing the reactions of children to the imposed uniformity of school life, confirmed that it was in the dull and repetitive patches that made up mast of childhood that growth and development as separate individuals took place. “It’s only when he fights against the dullness of routine that a child looks within himself and finds something sufficiently positive and personal to overcome the pattern that is forced upon him ”