About the Hours
Wednesday, 9 April 2008 — Lauds
Office Hours recapitulate the monastic day, or at least those parts of it at which, on any given day, I deign to check in. It’s hard to believe that, given the nature of things, I will end up checking in eight times a day.
While the reference to the hours is not intended to sound a religious note, it is quite self-consciously monastic. Although I live in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and come and go as I please, I am now old enough to carry the serenity of death wherever I go. By “the serenity of death,” I mean nothing other than the knowledge that remarkable people will live long after I am gone.  To acknowledge that the world will get along without me may not amount to any kind of immortality, but it frees me from the more deadening strains of egotism.
It would be incorrect to claim that I’m that rarest of Freudian types, the sublimated man; but it is true that what I discovered in the heat of adolescence was the beauty of form, and the idea that a day could take its shape from beautifully decayed French words made me drunk with medieval pretentions. Possessed of a gorgeously printed Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary — ignorant was I of Opus Dei — I struggled with determination to overlay a Benedictine regularity on the not-entirely-dissimilar routine of the Presbyterian boarding school where I spent the last two years of high school. Reciting the psalms and prayers made a fine farewell to the pretense of a faith that I had never in my life, even at that age, felt for an instant.
Two months ago — it began with the photo of the red stoop — I hit upon the solution, provisional at least, to a problem that had taxed me since the November of 2004 in which I began to keep a blog. How to post often during the day without cluttering the site with lots of entries? My daily diary — my basic blog — would consist of one entry, with additions ad lib. I knew that I had hit on a plan that would work for me when I saw that I could replace time-stamping (how dreary!) with the looser periods connoted by the Hours — which were called “hours” long before the notion of a sixty-minute interval occurred to anyone.
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