To a view of time as nothing more than a public schedule of events, useful and necessary though schedules maybe, boredom is a sign that something is lacking. The presence of boredom implies that, in addition to the common direction measured off by clocks and watches, time should have rhythm. 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, it will no doubt have piped music inside. Without it, we would become aware of the void between the beats of the clock, and so 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 for us as they rarely seem to be elsewhere. Rhythm is as public as clock-time, and as personal as the heartbeat. Music is perhaps the last experience where 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 could also have been experienced in this way, a personal thing like a dance or a song. From what I know of the theories about time in the ancient world, it would seem that their experience of time was different from ours.