In mid-July, my wife and I mused how we couldn’t believe it was already mid-July. This last Tuesday, we repeated our same confusion: “I can’t believe that it’s already 2022.”
We repeat this line nearly every week, nearly every month. Why wouldn’t we? In our experience of the last few years, time has only gathered speed. We’re up to our ankles in 2022 today; tomorrow morning, I’ll still recall arriving in North Carolina after the 20-hour drive from Austin. That was June 9, 2019.
But we have occasions and objects that pin the past more securely: weddings, trips, births, books, dogs, jobs, deaths, holidays, and meals. We recall them in compulsive detail, as though it might anchor them against the unabated flood of months around us.
On September 25, 2021, I finished reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (translated by John E. Woods). 65 days later, I read “Advent,” a poem by Bruce Bond, online at Image Journal. While scribbling my notes about each one, I didn’t realize they were becoming the landmarks of my autumn, nor that they would, today on this screen, recall my sensation of being passed by. But they did then, as they do now.
Now, they unseal the sort of question we love to suffer at this young time of the new year: Is there a difference between time passing us by, and us waiting faithfully through the passing time?
One Definition: Capital-T “Time”
Time, as it occurs in The Magic Mountain, is present, nearly an embodied character. Yet it also has an elusive, overflowing effect, like the rest of the novel’s myriad ideas: the curiosities of politics, philosophy, anatomy, astrology, botany, and other fields that so enthral the “perfectly ordinary” protagonist, Hans Castorp (along with Mann, his creator).
Ideas seduce Hans Castorp and the other residents within the Berghof Sanatorium where the novel takes place, but Time has the most decisive, irrevocable effects on them. Only Time, earning its embodied capital-T, moves them toward the maw of the 20th century. That’s where, bleakly but of course, Hans Castorp arrives by the story’s end: the trenches of World War I.
Here, the narrator reflects on Hans Castorp, lost to this manoeuvre:
“Oh, how ashamed we feel in our shadowy security! We’re leaving—we can’t describe this! But was our friend hit, too? For a moment, he thought he was. A large clod of dirt struck his shin—it certainly hurt, but how silly, it was nothing. He gets up, he limps and stumbles forward on mud-laden feet, singing thoughtlessly:
‘And all its branches ru-ustled,
As if they called to me—’
“And so, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, he disappears from sight.”
These lines, from the novel’s final passage, show Hans as one anonymous European among the many soon to be killed in the war. They also show the hand of Time as it ushers him along. Well before this ending, it seems an active force upon the novel—active and indifferent. Time shifts the scenery, from idyllic sanatorium to Swiss blizzard to stilted mealtimes to bedside deaths to macabre seances to gray, devouring warfare, and it does not care when tragedy or rapture rends the characters in its power. It does not notice.
Another Definition: Capital-A “Advent”
As powerful as Time, but gentler, was the waiting of this past Advent season. Advent is defined as “a coming into being or use.” It’s an arrival. And in the four weeks leading to the birth of Christ, capital-A Advent means waiting for—meditating on—what Christ’s arrival.
This past December, I realized for the first time that all of Christian life is an Advent season, for we await the second arrival of Christ. This analogue reached me partly through the Advent-themed texts I enjoyed this season: hymns like “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” (sung by a boy’s choir in the King’s College Chapel at Cambridge), and poems like “Advent” by Bruce Bond, “Loving the Dreadful Day of Judgement” by Fleming Rutledge, or “Advent, First Frost” by Anya Silver.
The poems, as much as the hymns playing through our kitchen every evening, submerged my mind in the gravity of what we await. “A child is born, / crowned in blood, and we lighten up,” reads “Advent.” Bond plumbs what the “winter child” meant—and means—to the world He entered:
“It has never happened,
and never will again, over and over
the will to be reborn, to gasp and cry
forgiveness.”
To anticipate the Advent of Christ, in Bond’s eyes, is “the will to be reborn” by this cosmos-defining event. We are reborn because of who Christ was and is—He is the savior who “blossoms through the wound.”
“Advent, First Frost” by Anya Silver traces the same cosmic thrill of awaiting Christ. Even a snippet from the poem feels like the touch of a cold, gentle tuning fork: “descended / like a feathered prophecy,” or “traced the veins and edges / of leaves with furred ink.” The tactile images approach the poem’s core:
“Every breath a birth,
a stir of floating limbs within me.”
Advent hangs on every hint of the birth, and on the eternal breath that it brought to us (what Silver calls “the silence coming”). Here, then, is the hope of Advent: joy in our salvation’s arrival. It is oblique in the poems, but clearer in our waiting.
This hope, I’d answer, is what differentiates waiting faithfully through the passing time from Time passing indifferently around us.
Purpose in Inescapable Passivity
If awaiting what was promised gives us hope, it also gives us purpose. It wasn’t by accident that Bach’s “Bereite dich Zion,” from his Christmas Oratio, contains the lyrics of a psalm entreating the people of the Lord to receive his Savior with weeping, joyful preparations for a wedding feast. Bereite, after all, roughly translates to “prepare.”
In waiting faithfully for someone personally intimate to us, we receive more hope and purpose than we would if we awaited only the Time of The Magic Mountain.
And yet, both ways of waiting share an inescapable passivity.
Think of how numbing a single year can feel, in its progression of days and unalterable pace—that’s our passivity. Time marches ever ahead, anyone can tell you that: annual occasions accumulate, we are born and we pass on, and calendars fill to obsolescence. Besides salvation and death, the incessant advance of the human clock is maybe life’s only guarantee.
In The Magic Mountain, Time renders all its characters passive, even before its final sweep. For much of the novel, Hans Castorp nurtures an unsaid, erotic attraction to the intoxicating Clavdia, a married Russian patient in the sanatorium. Theirs is a strangely affecting affair, as it ranges from physical fixation to dream-like connection to chaste courtship. But by the end it proves only a subplot.
Because Clavdia leaves the Berghof forever—between chapters. For all the glacial, meticulous brushstrokes that Hans and Clavdia’s affair receives in the novel, Time dispatches it without comment, along with many other characters who are painstakingly described, and endeared, to the reader.
Time is the truest antagonist of The Magic Mountain. Not for its malevolence, but for its indifference. It subjugates, without meaning to or caring, characters who are passive and powerless before it, characters goose-stepped into the war that unmade the West.
A Counterintuitively Christian Comfort
In a disquietingly similar way, God also acts beyond our reach. While He doesn’t disregard our hearts, He’s not beholden to our wishes. When we offer our requests to Him in prayer, we can’t guarantee He’ll grant them. Those black nights when we seek healing, He may instead give us new illness. That is passivity—living only by His untouchable mercy makes us powerless.
But, if you take God at His word, our passivity is our great comfort. He promises us provision even in the worst of circumstances, since we live by His untouchable mercy alone. Jeremiah 46:27-28, for one, voices this most counterintuitive hope:
“‘I will surely save you out of a distant place, your descendants from their land of exile.
Jacob will again have peace and security, and no one will make him afraid.
Do not be afraid, Jacob my servant, for I am with you,’ declares the Lord.”
I spent 2021 reading Jeremiah, and so I spent 2021 flinching at the wrath God brought on His people for their obstinate idolatry. I mourned the desolation that powerless Israel received, as they were dispatched and unmade by the Assyrians and Babylonians, just as Jeremiah and God Himself mourned it. It’s a sweeping, rending desolation almost beyond the words of the prophet.
Yet, in every guarantee of wrath for Israel, God promised also their future restoration. And we’re not as distant from ancient Israel as we’d like; nor should we be. Their promises from the Lord culminate in the Advent season we just celebrated. And they continue in the forever Advent that anchors our Christian faith.
That’s a comfort. It’s the only comfort I can reliably find in the God overflowing beyond my reach, despite the passivity I have to accept.
Welcome to 2022, readers and weepers. When I began it, this essay was meant to be a short one.
At this early stage, 2022 already has more where that “short” review came from: an article teasing out the aesthetic good of “difficult” texts, one to explore that shaggy Christian-esque conundrum Leo Tolstoy, an interview with a fellow Christian writer, and an utterly non-controversial look at how faith and literature ought to chafe at the false binaries of sociopolitical movements.
You can say it’s already a little dense. I would have to agree. But density is no reason to flee, if you find it in a thoughtful essay or a cheese wheel.
But if you like dense reading and you’re looking to vary your online diet in 2022, I recommend “The Sample,” a newsletter that helps you sample newsletters. Here’s how you sign up:
I’m adding it to my inbox this year, and honestly, they should pay me for all the free copywriting I’ve just done.
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch again on January 20.