Aaron Sorkin began writing one Friday night in New York City because he had nothing else to do. Bored, Sorkin took a typewriter (the only thing around in the otherwise empty apartment) and began scripting dialogue. Discovering he loved this, he never stopped. His long career as author of A Few Good Men, The West Wing, The Social Network, and so on began that night.
I heard Sorkin relate this story a few days ago and just before a short back and forth with a friend whose son is bravely trying to get away for a few months to someplace remote. He wants to volunteer but also to be free from the technology that over absorbs him. In essence, he knows he needs to get bored in order to grow.
Boredom, I had planned to write as I was thinking of these things yesterday, leads to a more authentic connection because you either have to confront yourself or speak with those around you, confrontations we can now always avoid.
But last night I remembered a book of essays by the child psychologist Adam Phillips: On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored. Without being able to bring to mind a single word of those essays—I read them twenty years ago—that volume suddenly felt important to today’s post. Unfortunately, though, I live without my books. They are in storage in New Hampshire; I am here in Amsterdam.
Could I get it online? Could I use the very technology which keeps us from ever being bored to write on why that avoidance is a problem?
Yes, sort of.
What came up were excepts of Phillips’s essay quoted in Maria Popova’s wonderful newsletter The Marginalian.
Boredom, Phillips says, is a “mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire
And the consequences I see (and everyone else sees too) of our relating to each other and ourselves badly because we are never bored (or alone) Phillips puts another way.
How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him — as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.
How far are we now from a culture in which people are given time to find what interests them? In the moment? In life?
I’ll just add the digressive point that while it is better to have access to Phillips’s words via the internet than to not have had them at all, I would prefer a long-forgotten book pulled out after years than doing a Google search.
A book is a vessel of time and thus forms part of that relationship I can only have with myself. My copy of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored is a character in the drama of my boredom. It belongs on stage as I fight free of that boredom into interest and camaraderie.
Everything on the net speaks as if from the audience. And though this voice may offer what I need or want, I am not sure, especially when it speaks to my needs or wants, I am ready to hear it.
Though like boredom it deserves a book, not a post, tomorrow I’ll say a few words on anger. For as I was writing the above an interruption from a friend in America reminded me of how discourse there moves immediately to the poles.
I suspect I’ll need to say something about the total failure of critical thinking, the teaching of which was once my occupation.