The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty. I not
want to push to extremes the objection to
excitement. A certain amount of it is wholesome,
but, like almost everything else, the matter is
quantitative. Too little may produce morbid
cravings, too much will produce exhaustion. A
certain power of enduring boredom is therefore
essential to a happy life, and is one of the things
that ought to be taught to the young.
All great books contain boring portions, and all
great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.
Imagine a modern American publisher confronted
with the Old Testament as a new manuscript
submitted to him for the first time. It is not difficult
to think what his comments would be, for example,
on the genealogies.
‘My dear sir,’ he would say, ‘this chapter lacks
pep; you can’t expect your reader to be interested
in a mere string of proper names of persons about
whom you tell him so little. You have begun your
story, I will admit, in fine style, and at first I was