Which isn’t surprising, for, although she is intelligent, she is also sensitive and kind-hearted.
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Although, it might be more accurate to say of Franny that her perfectionism, as it applies to others, is a response to what she sees as a general phoniness or pretentiousness among them, rather than to the more specific question of whether or not they engage in unceasing prayer (for that is an endeavor that is personal to her, and not necessarily a standard to which she holds other people) but the point remains. She is too hard on herself, and she is too hard on others to not be cognizant of how disagreeable to herself she has become.
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If you have read the novella Franny and Zooey, by J.D. Salinger, you’ll remember that the reason for Franny’s crisis, or spiritual collapse, is that she brings to this notion of unceasing prayer, as it applies to herself and to others, such perfectionism that she finds herself demoralized and exhausted.
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And, anyway, I do not wish to speak of unceasing prayer in conclusive terms, as if the work of achieving it resembles a journey one can complete, or get to the end of. For this is not the case. Saint Teresa of Ávila describes it in her book, The Way of Perfection, but emphasis in this title should be placed, I think, on the word “Way” not on the word “Perfection.”
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Any instance of prayer is good, where it consists of a sincere effort to yield one’s self to God, and perhaps not everyone is built for the sort of inward attrition that is necessary before room can be made, inside one’s self, for unceasing prayer to take place. So I do not mean to suggest that one type of prayer is suitable for everyone. To the contrary, people can find themselves discouraged if they are given cause to believe that everyone’s relationship to prayer should look the same, or that they must order their spiritual lives to an end that is not within their capacities to grasp.
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I suppose I could just say “prayer,” rather than “unceasing prayer,” but it is helpful to distinguish, I think, between a conventional understanding of prayer, which is the setting aside of some moments to communicate with the divine, and a less conventional understanding, which is the incorporation of that communing into one’s progression through time.
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There is a way to sustain this movement of the will, or, at least, to strengthen the will, as one would strengthen the body with exercise, so that the will becomes less susceptible to one’s moods or feelings. It is called unceasing prayer.
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Which is why we can say that love is not a feeling, but a movement of the will. Real love occurs through sanctification.
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Meaning, the path of sanctity is open to us all. And it does not require of us any particular talent, though it does require that we want it.
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And yet, if each moment offers itself up to be sanctified, by way of its admittance to our consciousness, we cannot, in authenticity, ignore the fact that we can, through a movement of our will, participate in this sanctification if we want to.
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Although, also, it isn’t the end of the world if our “good morning, how are you?” is only a pleasantry, a way of passing the time, rather than a query of utmost sincerity. Sometimes we’re not up to the task of sanctifying each moment, and that is ok. We don’t have to be saints.
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Of course, nothing has to be pedestrian, not even regular communication, not even a “good morning, how are you?” Each moment can be sanctified, depending on how we choose to inhabit it. Which is why art is not more special than any other endeavor, though it can feel special because of its monumentalism, and though the experience of it can bring one into a special relationship with reality.
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Although I suppose there are exceptions, as seems to be the case with the painter Agnes Martin, who I remember hearing say once, in an interview from her later years, something to the effect that, until a vision of what she should paint would come to her in its entirety, within her mind’s eye, she would sit in her studio, or before a blank canvas, and wait there, and not do anything, not even take up a paintbrush. Meaning, I guess, that she did not discover the work through the act of the work, as much as receive it in a kind of waking dream, and then render it. Which, in any case, is also different than merely expressing something that one wishes to give expression to. That is how art becomes pedestrian, or rote.
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Which is why the orientation of an artist should be toward what they will discover, by way of their work, not what they think they have to say to the world, as a reason to begin the work. This is related to Hemingway’s advice to “Forget your personal tragedy” and, if you are hurt, to “use it — don’t cheat with it.”
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Of which an artist is not necessarily aware, until their work is complete.
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For no single moment, or location, in any work of art is more important than any other, but all must be essential, each of them a blueprint or an echo for the thematic resonance of the whole.
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If I am writing a fiction about a man who is lost in a desert, for example, I must not concern myself with whether, by the end of it, he will find his way out, but must see, in my mind’s eye, only that which is visible to me at each moment of that fiction’s progressing. Otherwise I risk forcing it toward some end I imagine is proper, or best, but that will always be artificial, rather than allowing it to find its own denouement, and thus be natural and true.
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Which, interestingly enough, an artist need not be mindful of doing, and in fact is better off forgetting about, the same way an ice skater who is able to relegate her thoughts to a kind of no man’s land, and allow her body to move according to muscle memory, as she is performing a routine, is more likely to bring off that routine than is the ice skater whose thoughts are too near at hand, too present to herself, as she attempts each axel or lutz.
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For fate is always Shakespeare’s true heroine. Like any artist, he can’t help but allow the parts that he sets in motion to function in service of the whole.
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And then, as well, he seems thwarted by fate. Or, anyway, shaped by it. To the point that his own radiance disappears inside the radiance of the story in which he participates.