For sanctity is large enough to impart itself to all those durations of time for which we seek an occupation, but the reverse cannot be said, occupations themselves do not impart sanctity to time.
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I have always thought that the greatest way of finding meaning is the way of devotion, for example, insofar as, if one gives one’s self over to it, in the tradition of the saints, the separation between those moments where the individual is engaged in the revelation of meaning, and those moments where the individual is idle, or bored, or is otherwise ‘passing the time’ (which isn’t to say at play, or at rest), extends to such a degree, in favor of the former, that the latter will more or less evaporate.
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For a writer who feels their work as a ‘calling’ is a person who approaches language as a medium by which they would make art, as opposed to, say, a communication of ordinary purpose. And it is through the making of art, primarily, that an artist will find meaning in existence, though it is not the only way they might do so, and it is certainly no greater or authentic a way of finding meaning than some other way that might be conceived of, and that has nothing to do with art.
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The significance of which has to do, I think, with the way they find meaning in existence.
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Which isn’t to say that such narrators don’t have personalities beyond their identities as writers, for certainly they do, but that to separate their personalities from the fact that they are writers is more or less impossible. For they are not casual writers, these narrators, nor even, really, professional writers (though they might have a career that bears the semblance or the trappings of a profession), but are writers by calling, or by vocation.
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In other words, while fictitious, the storylines of such novels find their complications in the artistic, social, and professional circumstances of the ‘writerly’ aspect of the narrator’s life. Which can cause the reader to forget that the work does not posit itself as a recounting of actual events, and of things that could be said to have ‘happened,’ but as made-up, imagined, or, as John Gardner would put it, as a “vivid and continuous dream.”
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So far she puts me in mind of Rachel Cusk, in that her narrators (at least of those works that I have read) are writers who would seem to resemble their author, if it can be said that a novel that a reader holds in their hands, as they read it, can feel as though it has been written by that very narrator, even while a distinction between the narrator and the author is sustained.
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Though maybe I’ll read them however or whenever I come across them, it doesn’t matter to me the order. I made that remark, about reading them chronologically, only because I admire her enough that I would like to find out not only what she has imagined, in her fictive worlds, but how she may or may not have changed, and developed as a writer, over time.
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A couple of novels I’ve read and have loved, by a contemporary author, are by Sigrid Nunez. I first read The Friend, which was published a few years ago, and now I’ve been reading What Are You Going Through, which is her most recent; after this I think I’ll want to read all her books, going back to the first and making my way through them in the order they were published.
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I feel tired and discouraged, but also aimlessly or uselessly angry.
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I don’t know how I’m going to illustrate the third chapter of the Gospel of John, part of which is a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, so that there is very little action, and not much to dramatize, but mostly the sort of utterances that lend themselves, in the mind, to abstraction or ideation.
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Which isn’t to say that Kafka was commenting pessimistically on the human relationship to the divine, or that this novel was, necessarily, an indictment of the hierarchical nature of the spiritual realm, for he was too great an artist for his work to be reducible to a single, unambiguous meaning, but that, at least on this occasion, he seemed convinced that certain dimensions of reality must remain inaccessible to us, or, anyway, accessible to us only at the discretion of an authority that it is beyond our power to grasp.
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It has been said that Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle is a dramatization of such a concern, wherein the castle represents the seat of divine authority, and that the attempts of the main character, ‘K.,’ to gain admission to the inner chambers of that place, to which he has arrived at the story’s outset, are frustrated by a bureaucracy whose complexity is equaled only by the completeness with which its functionaries are able to account for it.
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Though I would hasten to add that this inaccessibility, where it occurs, does not arise from anything so human as haughtiness or pride, but from that beautifully divine logic that, while always inviting us into the districts of its presence, on terms that are appropriate to our station, leaves us free to determine, by way of our comportment, to what extent we will be admitted.
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In other words, just as it would not befit the majesty of a mortal king to avail itself to a petitioner or subject whose approach, in its casualness or its lack of appreciation for the moment, could be regarded as a discourtesy, or an absence of goodwill, the majesty of providence, infinitely greater in comparison, is bound to remain inaccessible to any who fail to meet it with the humility of a child, or a creature that is aware of its dependence on a benevolence that is greater than itself. For, if such were not the case, and a person could wrest from the seat of divinity that which he or she sought, merely by some inward directive of their will, faith could then arise from those conditions of egotism that are anathema to it, which is an impossibility.
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So that one might say that faith can begin to appear, in an individual, merely from a willingness to have it, and from a reverence for it as a possibility, but it cannot appear where there is no reverence for it as a possibility.
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Which isn’t to say that faith is to be regarded passively, as something that either belongs to us or not, like an attribute that one would inherit genetically, so that, if we feel its absence in us, in the main of our life, there is no point in attempting to open ourselves to the possibility that it might yet obtain to us, through a movement of our will, and by a reorientation of our self to reality, and a recognition of the goodness that is inherent in all things; for that is precisely the process by which it will take form in us, and grow. But only that it is in the nature of providence to know all things, so that that which will be written has been written, from the perspective of that non-contingent being that exists out-of-time, and that we can refer to as God.
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Though also, perhaps, it speaks to the deterministic aspect of existence, revealing without explanation that those who would have faith do have it, while those who would not have faith do not.
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That this imaginative work might make of faith, in the life of the individual, a sort of causality dilemma (a ‘chicken or the egg’ scenario) — in that one needs the childlike willingness that is characteristic of it in order to approach those truths with the awe or wonder they deserve, before one can even consider or adjudicate their reality; and that one then increases in the confidence or trustingness that is among faith’s endowments, by the very act of exercising that awe or wonder — is, I think, one of those paradoxes that speak to how the secrecy or hiddenness of God is maintained even while his nearness to us, and his friendship for us, is extended.
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And, secondly, that the religious truths we refer to as metaphorical, and that are often perceived as ‘not as true’ as those that are literal and that can be proven, assume the form they do not because they arise from a mythology that would deceive, or mislead, or otherwise condescend, but because, I think, if we attempt to trace the history of the personhood that is common to us all back into those stages of consciousness that have been lost in the mists of evolution, the way our individual memories are lost, at some point, in the mists of infancy and incomprehension, we must be willing to involve ourselves in the imaginative work that belongs more to the realm of poetry and allegory than to the realm of science and transcription, if we are to enter into the places where those truths transpire, and are made sensible to us.