I recently ran across a quote that I saved from a 2003 interview with writer Roger Angell. He was discussing baseball, which he’s covered for the New Yorker for over 40 years:
“Baseball is meant to be watched all the way through. Sure, it’s boring. There are boring innings and sometimes there turn out to be bad games, but you’re not going to have a feeling for the good games unless you’re willing to watch.
I think I wrote once that baseball in many ways is very much like reading. I said there are more bad books than bad ballgames, or maybe it was the other way around. I can’t remember. But each have formal chapters. There are wonderful beginnings that don’t stand up and boring beginnings that are great in the end. You just don’t know. They’re both, baseball and reading, for people who aren’t afraid of being bored.”
This struck me when I first read it because I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the number of books to read and things I want to learn that I urgently want to find only the good books and not waste any time on the mediocre ones. This reminded me that you can’t always know in advance what kind of book (or baseball game, or baseball season) you’re getting into, and part of the magic of reading and watching baseball is watching things unfold and seeing how it turns out. Reading and baseball often require you to reserve judgement for awhile, and they may surprise you before it’s all over.
This quote also seems to add another dimension to the concept of boredom. Maybe the tolerance for a certain amount of boredom is one of the ingredients of patience. The world seems like a very restless place sometimes. For example, I’ve been to conferences where there’s a small steady stream of people in and out the door during each session, always searching for the absolutely best presentation in that time slot, and sometimes that seems fairly representative of life these days.
This behavior reminds me of my desire to find only the most useful and powerful books to read. OK, life is short, and sometimes it is better to cut your losses and leave, especially if you find that the content or focus isn’t at all what you thought it was going to be. Heaven knows I’m not writing in praise of bad books, or bad presentations, or sticking with something even if it’s not right for you. But surely sometimes it’s better to sit tight and see what happens next, to find out for yourself if the lackluster beginning leads to a dazzling ending, or if there are enough flashes of insight along the way that it’s worth staying the course. Maybe we’d even feel richer in time if we could afford to spend some of it on activities that are not guaranteed to be rewarding? I don’t know; I’m thinking out loud more than usual here, and I’d be glad to hear what other people think.
