What did I do today? Is it really getting on toward dinner? Was today any different than the day before? But after the afternoon nap or coffee has worn off, those eager hands that may have just been doing something destructive or productive slip into forgetfulness. Peter” also remind us that it takes a city of faithful artisans and laborers and line managers, going about their daily business, for a crucifixion. Earlier works like the medieval mystery plays or Caravaggio’s “Crucifixion of St. Maybe our work or studies or the dreariness of Zoom do not feel quite like a “dying.” (Or, if you are writing a lengthy dissertation or term paper, maybe it does.) But in its subsequent “hours,” Horae Canonicae invites us to see in even our most consuming daily tasks – when we are really focused on the work at hand, when we betray, as Auden puts it, “that eye-on-the-object look” – a yearning that leads inevitably to the cross. But those waking minutes of tranquility, prior to the day’s temptations, also come, Auden suggests, with a sense of foreboding: “Afraid of our living task, the dying / Which the coming day will ask.” Recalled from the shades to be a seeing beingĪuden’s verse characterizes these moments in the next line as “holy,” before we have ever moved an arm, spoken a harsh word, or opened an email. It begins with the fleeting instant we all have upon waking, after our eyes open but before we have thrown off the covers: The first part of Auden’s poem, “Prime,” captures this feeling of encountering one’s bodily rhythms. At home, before the computer, facing the same walls and clothes and food: each day forces us to look more squarely at our bodily quirks and habits than ever before, and, just as easily, to forget them. This theme hits home for me especially this Lent, as the repetition of daily life in this second year of the pandemic has grown ever more tedious. But its theme is remarkably simple: how we replay the Passion each day in our working lives, from waking to sleep, a pattern that Auden explores by structuring his poem on the canonical hours – “Prime,” “Terce,” “Sext,” “Nones,” “Vespers,” “Compline,” “Lauds.” It’s a long and difficult poem, and, like Auden’s later work, deeply philosophical. ![]() Mark’s-in-the-Bowery, sitting quietly, so fellow parishioners later reminisced, in the back pews). ![]() Auden’s poem was written in stages between 19, after the British writer had settled in Manhattan (where he attended services at St. In his series of poems, Horae Canonicae, W.H.For the past several years, I’ve found myself returning to W. Jacobs argues that these moments are why attention is worth cultivating: “not just because it’s good for you or because it can help you ‘organize your world,’ but because such raptness is deeply satisfying. “And only those who have experienced that complete absorption of the self in something else,” writes Alan Jacobs in ,”something beautiful, know also what it means to have misplaced that capacity only we know the anxiety that arises from the fear we may never have that again,” writes Alan Jacobs in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. We miss a meal, not because we are busy, but rather, because we are so lost in what we are doing that we fail to notice we are hungry. We become so lost in what we are doing that time flies. ![]() We live in a multi-tasking world, but every so often we get lost in a task.
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