Quite simply, there is no formation without repetition. There is no habituation without being immersed in a practice over and over again… So it is precisely our allergy to repetition in worship that has undercut the counterformative power of Christian worship—because all kinds of secular liturgies shamelessly affirm the good of repetition. We’ve let the devil, so to speak, have all the repetition. And we, as liturgical animals, are only too happy to find our rhythms in such repetition. Unless Christian worship eschews the cult of novelty and embraces the good of faithful repetition, we will constantly be ceding habituation to secular liturgies.
Thomas Merton’s very tone conveyed a spiritual and intellectual authority which made his divagations into Orientalism sound rock solid; but Salinger in those days was still obliged to work with the cap and bells of his profession—by which I don’t mean that he was funny about his Eastern discoveries but that he was doomed to entertain whatever the subject. His story “Teddy” provides a far too slick introduction to Oriental wisdom (the magazines he trained under might have been okay at times for fiction, but they were death on wisdom). But when, in “Seymour: An Introduction,” he attempts to reduce the slickness by stirring some seriousness into the entertainment, his message strains mightily against his style in all its too-perfect shapeliness, causing Buddy Glass to apologize more than once for his helpless wordiness.So let us suppose the following: that Salinger swiftly became dissatisfied with this half-baked condition, half-slick and half-serious but really not enough of either, but yet was unwilling simply to retreat into his early triumphs, whose high polish might by now even have begun to strike him as a bit phony; so he simply decided to suspend publication then and there until such a time as he found a new style worthy of his subject. And if that should take forever, what is forever to a mystic?
Shields, of course, has written an entire testament, the manifesto-like book called “Reality Hunger,” in defense of the chop-shop approach to prose, with a high-minded po-mo appeal to the constant recycling of other people’s words as itself a kind of originality. Like many other capitalist ventures, though, this involves taking intricate handiwork done by other people, breaking it up, and selling it off again without permission, not to mention payment. If you have persuaded yourself that invention and recycling are the same thing, then you can’t begin to make sense of someone who would spend seven or eight hours a day laboring over a single line. This puts you in terrible shape with a writer like Salinger, who feels his entire life at stake over a semi-colon. What can he be doing all day in his “bunker” except stewing over his obsessions?
After taking part in a poetry programme for BBC School Radio, Seamus Heaney and I repaired to the George pub, round the corner from the BBC, with the producer Stuart Evans and his wife, Kay. We then walked to Soho for a curry. Outside the restaurant Seamus found a lady’s court shoe lying in the gutter. He picked it up and took it with us into the restaurant.During the meal Seamus inscribed a poem on the inside of the shoe. He did not show it to us. After the meal I asked him if I could have it. “Oh no,” he said. “It’s for the lady.” He laid the shoe reverently back where he had found it and we went our separate ways into the night.
I often asked him if he had ever had a reply from the shoeless woman. “Not yet,” he said. “But you never know.”
Square Montmartre, Corbasson, 2013
Whenever Doc needed to know anything touching on the world of property, Aunt Reet, with her phenomenal lot-by-lot grasp of land use from the desert to the sea, as they liked to say on the evening news, was the one he went to. “Someday,” she prophesied, “there will be computers for this, all you’ll have to do’s type in what you’re looking for, or even better just talk it in — like that HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey? — and it’ll be right back at you with more information than you’d ever want to know, any lot in the L.A. Basin, all the way back to the Spanish land grants—water rights, encumbrances, mortgage histories, whatever you want, trust me, it’s coming.” Till then, in the real non-sci-fi world, there was Aunt Reet’s bordering-on-the-supernatural sense of the land, the stories that seldom appeared in deeds or contracts, especially matrimonial, the generations of family hatreds big and small, the way the water flowed, or used to.
There’s some talk afterward, as there always is these days, about whether Federer should retire. This drives me crazy, so give me a second. Watching Federer decline makes me sad. Watching him lose to Tommy Robredo, whom he’d beaten easily in all 10 of their previous matches, made me sad. And if I could build a bonfire out of every editorial and every blog post arguing that the ol’ champ should hang ‘em up before he tarnishes his “legacy,” I would build it, then I would burn the ashes, then I would blast the sticky ash-residue out into space, then I would fire warheads at the space capsule. Have you ever bothered to think about what “legacy,” in this sense, really means? Legacy is a marketing tool; it exists for the convenience of people who want to sell you something. It has nothing to do with the athlete, whose accomplishments aren’t going to change if he plays past his prime, literally aren’t going to change at all, because Skip Bayless doesn’t own a time machine. Legacy is a post-Jordan, made-up idea that glorifies “going out on top” as part of a corporate strategy, presuming that fans don’t have memories and can’t cope with the complexity of a human life. Legacy belongs in the same pile of bogus thought-propaganda as “controlling the narrative” and “personal brand.” I would fire warheads at the warheads, I’m not kidding.So unless what you’re after in sports is to associate some abstract concept of winner-iness with a particular shoe line, meaning you need a sanctioned moment of narrative closure that licenses you to keep making that association, and keep buying those shoes, forever, just please, please come off it. What do you have to gain by railroading Federer into retirement? He’s comfortably one of the 10 best players in the world. Do you know how hard that is? What a great career that would be for almost anyone? If he finds playing meaningful and likes being out on tour, why on earth should he stop? Because somebody wants the luxury of having fewer memories of him? Look, I, too, think it’s rad that Borg walked away from the game when he was 25.3 Here’s a sports-grade argument for you: Federer isn’t Borg! If he doesn’t want to do the scorched-earth/mountaintop thing, let him go out softly. Say he wants to play qualifiers in his forties; that would also be great and fascinating and totally within his rights.
An ancient Roman bridge spans the Wadi al Murr in Mosul, Iraq, 1920.Photograph by M. V. Oppenheim, National Geographic