On Repetition as a Pleasure and a Necessary Torment

We have entered the time of the school year that my colleagues at a previous teaching post called “Angry April”—and not without reason. The closing of the school year can bring a slew of frustrations that induce anything from hand-wringing to the sudden and unexplained use of personal days. In addition to stress, it’s ironically the monotony that can abrade even seasoned teachers at this time of year. We find ourselves thinking, “I can’t believe these kids still can’t recite their course catechism,” “Surely, they’re not giving me four prep periods again,” and “How can I keep doing this for x more days?”  

In his spiritual biography, Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton comments on the fact that “grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.”[1] Chesterton contrasts humans with God, who proves His ability to exult in the tedious by making “all daisies alike” simply because He “has never got tired of making them.”[2] A decade of shaping students in the classroom has granted me some small share in God’s pleasure in continuous creation, but unlike Him, I do get tired.   

Chesterton rightly identifies the young and the Divine as beings who find pleasure in repetition. While he is right that grown-ups aren’t “strong enough to exult in monotony,” the human attitude toward repetition depends predominantly on our disposition toward what is repeated. A child delights in a silly noise or expression and demands to experience it again. A parent enjoys a video of her child’s first soccer goal and watches it over and over. A teacher dearly wishes he could replicate a line of questioning from his first period class for his afternoon section. A student mentally relives a flawless recitation or a perfect free throw. It goes without saying that repetition is a pleasure when its object is desirable.  

It is thus a predictable inconsistency that while humans enjoy the repetition of pleasurable things, we abhor the repetition of unpleasant things. In J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, the hero, Bilbo, evinces this tendency in that he would feast upon seedcakes and tea infinitely but longs for his comfortable hobbit-hole each time he is faced with a particularly nasty obstacle. Tolkien punctuates episodes where Bilbo longs for home with the refrain “Not for the last time!”[3] The phrase signals the feelings of dread and self-pity that repeated episodes of suffering evoke in Bilbo. Interestingly, Tolkien uses it only when Bilbo laments the bad things that are happening and never when he rejoices in the good.  

Bilbo embodies the human response to repeated little torments. The child who delights in the repetition of funny faces detests her nightly helping of steamed broccoli. The parent who enjoys videos of his children on repeat dreads shuttling sick children to the doctor’s office. The teacher who wishes to replicate a lively discussion abhors answering the question she just answered—twice. A student loathes reviewing his Latin vocabulary and memorizing the lines of a poem. Teachers and families alike find themselves pining for the bright, easy days of summer break. Not for the last time! 

Perhaps the act of repetition isn’t the culprit after all, for repetition is merely a process. Objects of repetition may afford pleasure or cause disgust, but the way we regard them is what most shapes our attitude toward their monotony. When repetition makes us joyful, it ought to also make us grateful. When repetition makes us miserable, it ought to also make us meek. Each one of us is like the student who must repeat lines over and over to commit them to memory and internalize their meaning. The lines or their lesson may chafe us at the outset but needn’t gall us for long. As educators, parents, and students anticipate the challenges of the ending of the school year, we should acknowledge that repetition affords the opportunity to face the same circumstances with new dispositions and perform recurring tasks with fresh verve and grace. By rightly understanding repetition as a necessary tool for self-knowledge and an impetus for virtue, we will dread the monotony of April and May for the last time. 

[1] G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (The Bodley Head, 1908; Project Gutenberg, 2005), chap. 4, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16769/16769-h/16769-h.htm. 

[2] Chesterton, Orthodoxy, chap. 4.

[3] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit (HarperCollins, 2012).