The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time

by Judith Shulevitz

  3.

  AS THE SABBATH STARTED to shed its religious meanings, it began to be seen as a day of personal and social improvement. This, too, was in part an effect of the association between the Sabbath and pedagogy. If you wanted to identify the remains of a Sabbatarian sensibility in our view of the weekend today, you might start with the sense that we are obliged to use it to better our condition. We think of Saturday and Sunday as time not merely for resting but for trying to become the kind of people that work prevents us from being. We catch up on our reading. We try to get our children to spend some time playing out of doors. All this was learned in the nineteenth century, when people began to reconceive of Sunday variously as an opportunity to refresh their parched spirits, to return to a natural world from which they felt increasingly cut off, and to rediscover lost connections with those around them.

  In his writings on the Sabbath, Dickens didn’t only attack Sabbatarian hypocrisies; he also advocated the use of Sunday for restorative outings, and in so doing helped release a torrent of literature arguing that Sunday should be a day for promoting mental well-being and improving moral character. Call this the Hygienic Sabbath. In 1836, during his time as a reporter on parliamentary affairs, Dickens published a pamphlet attacking a piece of proposed legislation that would have strengthened Sunday closing laws. In the pamphlet, he contrasts the stifling Sundays of the urban poor, who get bored and drunk and commit crimes because they are kept from exercise and recreation by Sunday-closing laws, and the expansive Sundays of those who are free to enjoy the sun, the wind, and Sunday outings. Dickens’s description of one healthful Sunday is by far the most vivid of its kind, so I’ll quote it at length:

  Here and there, so early as six o’clock, a young man and woman in their best attire, may be seen hurrying along on their way to the house of some acquaintance, who is included in their scheme of pleasure for the day; from whence, after stopping to take “a bit of breakfast,” they sally forth, accompanied by several old people, and a whole crowd of young ones, bearing large hand-baskets full of provisions, and Belcher handkerchiefs done up in bundles, with the neck of a bottle sticking out at the top, and closely-packed apples bulging out at the sides,—and away they hurry along the streets leading to the steam-packet wharfs, which are already plentifully sprinkled with parties bound for the same destination. Their good humour and delight know no bounds—for it is a delightful morning, all blue over head, and nothing like a cloud in the whole sky; and even the air of the river at London Bridge is something to them, shut up as they have been, all the week, in close streets and heated rooms…. Away they go, joking and laughing, and eating and drinking, and admiring everything they see, and pleased with everything they hear, to climb Windmill Hill, and catch a glimpse of the rich corn-fields and beautiful orchards of Kent; or to stroll among the fine old trees of Greenwich Park, and survey the wonders of Shooter’s Hill and Lady James’s Folly; or to glide past the beautiful meadows of Twickenham and Richmond, and to gaze with a delight which only people like them can know, on every lovely object in the fair prospect around. Boat follows boat, and coach succeeds coach, for the next three hours; but all are filled, and all with the same kind of people—neat and clean, cheerful and contented.

  If today we think of the weekend as a time for communing with nature, that, too, was the doing of nineteenth-century writers. In the hands of poets, novelists, and intellectuals, the Sabbath became a lyrical and pastoral notion, a weekly haven from the burgeoning industrial order. You might think of the turn toward nature as a swerve away from theology, and it was, but since the swerve was made under the sway of poets, God was never far from their thoughts. Nature, to them, was God’s true abode, and they considered gamboling or wandering outdoors a holier pastime than confining their limbs to a pew or desk. “Some keep the Sabbath going to Church—,” wrote Emily Dickinson in 1861. “I keep it, staying at Home— / With a Bobolink for a Chorister— / And an Orchard, for a Dome—.” And so: “instead of getting to Heaven at last— / I’m going all along.”

  If you were going to trace the natural Sabbath back to one man in particular (a dubious exercise, I know), it would probably be Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the autobiographer, novelist, philosopher, and political theorist who simultaneously inspired the French Revolution, the Romantic return-to-nature movement, and various forms of radical pedagogy. “Childhood is unknown” is how Rousseau opened his prescient if rather strange book Emile, or On Education (strange because of Rousseau’s many strange opinions, such as his conviction that children should not be allowed to read made-up stories). Rousseau’s views on pedagogy were the exact opposite of the Sabbatarian practice of it. The Puritans had treated children as little adults. They had dressed their babes in grown-up clothes and taught them grown-up theology and made them conform to grown-up manners, especially in church. But Rousseau insisted that children amount to a foreign species hidden in plain sight, with their own logic and modes of cognition. Moreover, child and nature are one, which means that child and nature and God are one, too, and all are good. The child, closer to nature than the adult, is holier than adults, too, since human institutions, including most forms of schooling, are unnatural and corrupting. Therefore, the place for children to learn about God is not in church on Sunday, but out of doors. They can deduce his existence from the workings of nature and thereby cultivate the divine within themselves.

  I should say that Rousseau never wrote about the Sabbath. Nor did he keep it. If he had, I feel certain that he would have spent it strolling through the countryside, investigating botanical specimens. In the fifth of his Reveries of a Solitary Walker, for instance, Rousseau described as the happiest period of his life two months spent on a remote island in a Swiss lake called, evocatively, Lake of Bienne (Bienne evoking, to the French ear, bien, which means “well”), to which he had fled after his books Emile and The Social Contract had been condemned by the French Parliament and his house pelted with stones. On his island refuge, cut off from the outside world with all its demands, he engaged in the “precious far niente,” the doing of nothing, and lost himself for hours each day in the study of blades of grass, bits of moss, lichen.

  Rousseau, in that essay, helped define the modern idea of time off. He sketched out the notion of a time out of time that, though not religious per se, is prelapsarian—that is, as whole and non-alienated as the time before Adam and Eve were exiled from the garden. “What, then, was this happiness, and in what did this joy consist?” asked Rousseau. Part of it was the relief of not having to live up to expectations, part of it was the delight of investigating flowers and plants, and part of it was giving himself over to reverie. But part of it had to do with a novel yet very old sense of time, time experienced as he imagined babies experience it, as plenitude and sensation and living in the moment. Grown-up time, Rousseau declared, is absent from itself. We fall into it as we fell from Eden, yet we never occupy it. We dwell in the past and the future but never in the present. At no one moment of existence is there anything “solid enough for the heart to attach itself to.” But now, as he sat at the Lake of Bienne, sometimes rocking in a boat, sometimes waiting on the shore of the lake when the water happened to be rough, he rediscovered a way of being in time “that, as long as it lasts, could be called happy.”

  This was the first inkling of what I’d call the Romantic Sabbath, an unpressured, serendipitous, nostalgic experience of time in which the soul finds “a seat solid enough to rest itself there completely and to gather together all its being without needing to recall the past or to straddle the future.” This idea was developed by William Wordsworth in his epic, The Prelude (1799–1805), the tale of how nature formed him as a poet—its full title is The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind: An Autobiographical Poem. In the poem, Wordsworth touches only glancingly on the Sabbath, but he has a great deal to say about time and how it shaped his identity, and the Sabbath plays a more important role than its brief mention would seem to imply.

  Wordsworth begins
the poem by fleeing the city for a stroll in the Lake Country, during which he tries to begin writing his great poem in his head. Instead of plunging in, he finds himself lounging in the shade of a tree, “slackening my thoughts by choice.” He tries to start the poem again: “my soul / once more made trial of her strength.” Once again he fails. Finally, he realizes that he must cease his striving and accept the need for silence. He must not “bend the Sabbath of that time / To a servile yoke.” Giving in to the Sabbath and the nonproductivist side of his nature, to what his fellow Romantic John Keats called his negative capability, Wordsworth strays about “Voluptuously, through fields and rural walks”; he asks “no record of the hours, resigned / To vacant musing, unreproved neglect / Of all things, and deliberate holiday.”

  This “holiday” from the work of composition, this starting, stopping, then wandering off, will leave its stamp on The Prelude, which curls, shaggy and undulating, “mazy as a river,” in critic Geoffrey Hartman’s phrase, back and forth between present and past and through the twists and turns of Wordsworth’s slow maturation. The “Sabbath of that time” is the moment (or perhaps the anti-moment) that allows the poet to break through to another order of time—“spots of time,” he calls them elsewhere. In these spots, “our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired.” As in, say, the psychoanalytic session (an idea not unaffected by Wordsworth, or at least by Romanticism), memories reawaken and joys and traumas are lived and felt again and understood perhaps for the first time.

  Wordsworth, of course, is the quintessential nature poet; we imagine him hiking up mountains and strolling along shores in the English Lake District. And yet nature, for Wordsworth, had its own temporality as well as its own geography. E. P. Thompson would have called Wordsworth’s idea of natural time “preindustrial,” and it’s true that in The Prelude Wordsworth makes much of a shepherd who lived an entirely seasonal life and worked “for himself, with choice / Of time, and place, and object.” But Wordsworth’s natural time was not merely the antithesis of industrial time. It had its own rhythms. At one point, for instance, Wordsworth gives heartfelt thanks that he had one of those free, outdoor, unsupervised childhoods that seems to have been rare even in the eighteenth century. Nature saved him, he writes, “from an evil which these days have laid / Upon the children of the land”—the evil of being tightly scheduled and oppressively supervised, “hourly watched, and noosed, / Each in his several melancholy walk / Stringed like a poor man’s heifer at its feed, / Led through the lanes in forlorn servitude.”

  What is natural time like, for Wordsworth? It was like his late mother, he says, who in her maternal patience never demanded developmental milestones from her son, never “from the season asked / More than its timely produce; rather loved / The hours for what they are.” Unnatural time, on the other hand, demands too much and destroys the soul. If natural time was female, unnatural time was male. Men are “the keepers of our time,” who chain the young people in their charge to a predetermined path, “to the very road / Which they have fashioned would confine us down / Like engines.” Accepting the “Sabbath of that time,” then, means stopping unnatural time so as to create a moment for natural time, which allows one to expand and flourish according to its organic laws.

  A less individualistic vision of the natural Sabbath—we could call this one the Communitarian Sabbath—comes to us from the novels of George Eliot, the nom de plume of Mary Ann Evans, who received an evangelical education but lost her religion when she entered the world of letters. Eliot had a broader vision of nature than Wordsworth did; for her, it was social as well as environmental and temporal, comprising not only the wilderness that lies beyond the reach of civilization but also the kind of community that is held together by organic bonds, by the ties of family, affection, and village economy. Eliot grew up in the countryside and possessed an encyclopedic understanding of the religious life of the small English town, and in her first novel, Adam Bede (1859), Eliot devotes a chapter to the sympathetic depiction of a village Sabbath in an English hamlet called Hayslope.

  Adam Bede takes place sixty years before it was written, at the turn of the nineteenth century, when livelihoods still came from small farms and artisanal cottage industries. The Sabbath described in the novel probably seemed more pastoral in retrospect than at the time it occurred. When Eliot looked backward, she found “the deep-rooted folk memory of a ‘golden age’ or ‘Merrie England,’” as E. P. Thompson put it, which “derives not from the notion that material goods were more plentiful in 1780 than in 1840 but from nostalgia for the pattern of work and leisure which obtained before the outer and inner disciplines of industrialism settled upon the working man.” In Hayslope, the Sabbath does not descend from the heavens above; it ascends from the natural world below, “the cocks and hens,” which “seemed to know” that it was Sunday “and made only crooning subdued noises,” and the bull-dog, which looked “less savage, as if he would have been satisfied with a smaller bite than usual.” The very sunshine “seemed to call all things to rest and not to labour.”

  Next to respond to the call of the Sunday sun are the people of the village, who primp for church then amble toward it, converging in the churchyard as the animals did in the farmyard. When the church service begins, the resonant spirits in the congregation swell with an imaginative capaciousness not available to them on any other day of the week. Adam Bede proves particularly susceptible to “the other deep feelings for which the church service was a channel … as a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility.” This Sunday sensibility does not grace only the spiritually gifted. It serves as the fulcrum of Hayslope life, and of the novel. Almost all of the important plot developments in Adam Bede occur on Sundays, when people have the time and the inclination to acknowledge and interact with one another. The hushed air of holiness that prevails when the church service ends turns a fractious town into a blessed community, for after that comes “the quiet rising, the mothers tying on the bonnets of the little maidens who had slept through the sermon, the fathers collecting the prayer-books, until all streamed out through the old archway into the green churchyard, and began their neighbourly talk, their simple civilities, and their invitations to tea.”

  In a letter written one Sunday about the Sabbath state of mind, George Eliot equated the religious experience with the poetic experience. Without religion, she said, we suffer the fate of “poor mortals” who wake up one morning and find “all the poetry in which their world was bathed only the evening before utterly gone—the hard angular world of chairs and tables and looking-glasses staring at them in all its naked prose.” Sunday cleared a space in which the imagination might roam free—the social imagination as much as the individual imagination; and the imagination, for Eliot, as for Wordsworth, is what gives minds the power to tease out of ordinary life intimations of beauty and a moral order.

  The writer who best captured the Romantic Sabbath, though, to my mind, is D. H. Lawrence—not a nineteenth-century writer, I grant you, but one whose memory encompassed enough of the previous century to be worth including here. He, too, regretted the vanishing of what he called the “Sunday world.” In a scene in Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow (1915) largely based on his own childhood, Ursula Brangwen, his heroine, sadly contemplates the disappearance of “the old duality of life”—“wherein there had been a weekday world of people and trains and duties and reports, and besides that a Sunday world of absolute truth and living mystery, of walking upon the waters and being blinded by the face of the Lord, of following the pillar of cloud across the desert and watching the bush that crackled yet did not burn away.”

  Ursula’s memories of her childhood Sundays combine both Wordsworth’s lyrically pastoral time and Eliot’s blessed Sunday community in the figure of the happy member of the happy family. In fact, Lawrence’s description of a typical Sunday in Ursula’s family offers such a perfect vision of human happiness that I can do no more
than quote it at length:

  Even at its stormiest, Sunday was a blessed day. Ursula woke to it with a feeling of immense relief. She wondered why her heart was so light. Then she remembered it was Sunday. A gladness seemed to burst out around her, a feeling of great freedom. The whole world was for twenty-four hours revoked, put back. Only the Sunday world existed.

  She loved the very confusion of the household. It was lucky if the children slept till seven o’clock. Usually, soon after six, a chirp was heard, a voice, an excited chirrup began, announcing the creation of a new day, there was a thudding of quick little feet, and the children were up and about, scampering in their shirts, with pink legs and glistening, flossy hair all clean from the Saturday’s night bathing, their souls excited by their bodies’ cleanliness.

  As the house began to teem with rushing, half-naked clean children, one of the parents rose, either the mother, easy and slatternly with her thick, dark hair loosely coiled and slipping over one ear, or the father, warm and comfortable, with ruffled black hair and shirt unbuttoned at the neck….

  On this day of decorum, the Brangwen family went to church by the high-road, making a detour outside all the garden-hedge, rather than climb the wall into the churchyard. There was no law of this, from the parents. The children themselves were the wardens of the Sabbath decency, very jealous and instant with each other.

  It came to be, gradually, that after church on Sundays the house was really something of a sanctuary, with peace breathing like a strange bird alighted in the rooms. Indoors, only reading and tale-telling and quiet pursuits, such as drawing, were allowed. Out of doors, all playing was to be carried on unobtrusively. If there were noise, yelling or shouting, then some fierce spirit woke up in the father and the elder children, so that the younger were subdued, afraid of being excommunicated.