Boredom is a sign that something is lacking from the experience of time as a public schedule of events, useless and necessary though schedules may be. The presence of boredom implies that, in addition to the common direction measured off by clocks and watches, time should have a rhythm as well. If there were a rhythm, if being alive had something like music to it, one would not simply cave in because one had nothing to do. When the new mall opens, with its clock tower and everything else, it will no doubt have piped music inside. Without it we would become aware of the void between the beats of the clock and fall between them in boredom, as I used to do on Sunday afternoons.
Music is an extraordinary phenomenon, particularly by the standards of the modern world.
But in music, the free and the determined, the public and the personal, are combined as they rarely seem to be elsewhere. When I sing a song, it seems to come from my own heart, as if I had composed it, and it certainly comes from my own lungs. But I might well be singing this song as part of a huge choir where each member carries the same melody under the direction of the same baton. Music is perhaps the last experience in which modern man knows what it is to be both bound and free, to share an objective reality that is also an expression of his own freedom. But it is possible that in the past time may also have been experience in this way, a personal thing like a dance or a song.