In Search of Ordinary Time
“Everyday life”—that boring and mundane, trivial and profane measure of our existence—assumed tremendous significance when modern artists like Johannes Vermeer gave depth perception to our daily doings. As if to do the human humdrum justice, his “Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window” hangs in our family’s bathroom. Once upon a time, maybe on a Monday or Tuesday, my wife found dampened copies of the Dutch Master’s paintings alongside the curb, set amidst someone’s second-hand trash as if the series were altogether unremarkable; now they keep their quiet watches over our chores.
In the centuries that followed Vermeer’s visions, novelists also kept their quiet watches and painted in these ordinary shades. George Eliot’s Middlemarch pursues not a great heroine, a paradigm of holiness or excellence, but a “Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing.” Why? Because “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” Eliot fixed her telescope not on sublime peaks but on “frail vessels” who—despite their “nothingness”—“insist on mattering.” Picking up Eliot’s mantle, Henry James argued that the art of modern fiction excels in its capacity to “show what an ‘exciting’ inward life may do for the person leading it even while it remains perfectly normal.” Proust, that “Vermeer of the novel,” perfected this search for ordinary time, discovering magnificence in unlikely candidates: “truly saintly embodiments of practical charity” have not halos or auras but the “cheerful, practical, brusque and unemotional air of a busy surgeon”; though if in their faces one can “discern no commiseration, no tenderness at the sight of suffering humanity, no fear of hurting it” he paints these profane saints with “the impassive, unsympathetic, sublime face of true goodness.”
Yet as Erich Auerbach argues in Mimesis, the first serious treatment of everyday life was found not in Madame Bovary but in the Biblical Gospels. Auerbach focuses specifically on Peter’s denial scene, as it dramatizes “tremendous ‘pendulation’” in the heart of a fisherman, a man whom pagan antiquity could only have treated comically. And yet, Peter’s denial as set forth in the Gospel account “is too serious for comedy, too contemporary and everyday for tragedy, politically too insignificant for history—and the form which was given it is one of such immediacy that its like does not exist.” Auerbach draws out the radicality of the Gospel on the literary level:
“The random fisherman or publican or rich youth, the random Samaritan or adulteress, come from their random everyday circumstances to be immediately confronted with the personality of Jesus; and the reaction of an individual in such a moment is necessarily a matter of profound significance.”
While the serious treatment of a “petty” person combines the tragic and the comic, the Gospels contain a noteworthy silence concerning everyday life—the register of existence-in-time wherein one does what one always does. As Friedrich Hölderlin makes plain, comedy gives “a true but poetically grasped and artistically presented copy of so-called ordinary, habitual life.” He goes on to clarify that the aesthetic elevation of habitual life takes a portion of our existence that in fact “stands in a weaker and more distant relation to the whole” and makes it “infinitely significant,” even though it is “to a high degree insignificant in itself.”
Do we, in the Gospels, encounter a reconciliation of the comic and the tragic? We have not James Joyce’s little, “evanescent” Dubliners epiphanies, wherein “He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent for in my heart I had always despised him a little . . . ” but instead the grand gold, myrrh, and frankincense Epiphany of the Magi. If sometimes we approach the common sight of “two ships standing by the lake: but the fishermen were gone out of them and were washing their nets,” these weary fisherman with their well-worked nets are soon collecting from the deep an absolutely miraculous catch (Luke 5:1-11). We have not another weekday evening meal, but the extraordinary dinner at a tax collector’s house, to say nothing of the Last Supper, which was no forgettable annual pesach. We have, momentarily, daily bread and wine, but they become—in Christ’s hands—the body and blood of God.
Everywhere we have Epiphanies of the most consequential order, but in terms of what is given narration, we witness an eclipse of ordinary happenings and habitual time. In The Lord, Romano Guardini argues that though the “public life of the Lord lasted at the utmost a brief three years… But precisely for this reason how significant the preceding thirty years in which he did not teach, did not struggle, did not work miracles.” And yet if those hours as a carpenter’s apprentice are indeed hugely significant, why do we not see him with the blade or the plane, why does the Book omit sawdust and routine, the kind of day when “nothing happened”?
In his analysis of Abraham and the spare prose with which the Word bespeaks the sublime sacrifice of his son, Auerbach argues that the Biblical style includes “only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else is left in obscurity.” What lies between, what remains undefined calls out for interpretation. Much interiority remains “unexpressed” only “suggested by silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal . . . [all else] remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background.’” It is precisely the descriptive thinness that invites us into the ineffable. There is no “raid on the inarticulate” because, as Wittgenstein would have it, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
But the supersaturated detail, by obtaining on the literal and the moral and the mystical level, does not—does it?—necessarily eliminate mystery, does not send it, through language, into exile. Further, if we are to apply this paucity of details to the analogous near-entire omission of Christ’s first thirty years (the Presentation in the Temple and the Finding in the Temple stand as Revelatory exceptions), ought we to conclude that this time is more charged with mystery than the miracles and the public spectacle of the Cross (Colossians 2:15)?
And yet, as Hölderlin show us, the comic writer’s aesthetic articulation of the ordinary tends to strip it of its actual relative insignificance. Only rarely do we witness the daily stripped of all aura. David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King invites us into this ultra-mundane when for four pages IRS workers complete their daily office: “Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing attaches a form to a file. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound.” Joyce’s Ulysses culminates with a series of unremarkable meals shared by Stephen and Bloom, but these mundane meals are—within the spiritual and moral trajectories of the characters—markedly and memorably eucharistic. We can wonder whether this partaking of coffee, buns, and cocoa reveal a participation of the apparently mundane in the sacred commemoration, or whether the scenes demystify, with jocoseriousness, Holy Mass: “His attention was directed to them by his host jocosely, and he accepted them seriously as they drank in jocoserious silence Epps’s massproduct, the creature cocoa.” At best, the narrative injects an outsized gravitas into the profane, elevating it beyond its regularity, bidding us see sacred immanence sans the home economy of actual grace.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains that “During the greater part of his life Jesus shared the condition of the vast majority of human beings: a daily life spent without evident greatness, a life of manual labour.” Given this, “the hidden life at Nazareth allows everyone to enter into fellowship with Jesus by the most ordinary events of daily life.” But the Gospels do not give us an account of that ordinariness. There is no chapter that reads like so: Jesus played outside. Joseph coughed and laughed. Mary did the dishes. And yet, this playing and coughing and doing of dishes is what, for most of us, comprises so much that happens in ordinary time.
The fellowship, then, must happen through a mysterious silence. But how? We have no manifest model of Joseph counseling Jesus, of Mary and Joseph arguing well, of Jesus nailing wood. Should we begin with our own mundanity and imagine that ours, like theirs, holds an analogous union with the then-silent Word? As Guardini notes in The Lord, “there is almost nothing in Jesus’ life which attracts the reverent imagination more than the prodigious silence of these thirty years.” But how, precisely, do we receive the consecration of our unremarkable hours from the little we do receive of His habitual years?: “they returned into Galilee, to their city Nazareth. And the child grew, and waxed strong, full of wisdom; and the grace of God was in him” (Luke 2:39-40).
If Hölderlin is right, and the aesthetic mediation of the mundane makes what is habitual seem infinitely important even though it is in fact insignificant relative to the whole, then the Gospels resist this falsification, and they bid us do the same. Speaking in Nazareth, Pope Paul VI proclaimed that the lesson of the “home of Nazareth,” the “school where we begin to understand the life of Jesus,” is “first, then, a lesson of silence. May esteem for silence, that admirable and indispensable condition of mind, revive in us.” Through their silence vis-à-vis the everyday, the Scriptures reveal the humiliating truth about the Word, who subjected so much of His time here to unknowing, forgetting, who received no histrionic recognition as His mother picked bitter herbs and his father, finished with work for the day, bid him fetch water from the well, and the three of them “drinketh of this water” although, afterward, they “shall thirst again” (John 4:13), and as the Son of God sips with his lips, these sips slip into insignificance even as they nourish his flesh, infinitesimally but surely, for the day at Cana when his hour has come and he turns water into wine.
Joshua Hren is founder and editor of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the MFA at University of St. Thomas, Houston. He is the author of, among other books, Infinite Regress: A Novel, and Contemplative Realism.