Here’s how it went down: It was the Friday before Christmas, a mildly chilly but otherwise clear early-winter day. My son was just back from college.

My gentle, brown-eyed husband, disabled now for almost three years, arrived home in a transport van, and began the task of wheeling himself into the house, when all of sudden our high school daughter—about to head out with her boyfriend—ran into the house to say that my husband’s feet were bleeding, all the way up the ramp into the house. We shooed her off, and then my son and I took over, trying to stanch the blood and rebandage the feet.

Within a few minutes, after we had called 911 but before the paramedics had whisked him away to the glistening new hospital next to the Beltway, we checked his blood pressure: 66 over 34. I pray that you don’t have the experience to know how bad that is.

Then followed the scramble, to the ER and to the dizzying days that followed—the frantic drives and cell-phone calls with doctors in parking-garage stairwells, as I furtively sought to jam a parking pass into a digital pay machine. My husband was alive, which was good. And we loved him. But there was something else, and I can’t recall now whether it was I or my son that said it, as we turned to each other in the car:

“You know, this is actually kind of fun.”

I’m horrified by that now, but we were telling the truth. It was “fun” in the same sense that Walker Percy once said that man would rather live through a hurricane than an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. What we were doing felt urgent, and important. That is in theory nothing new: after all, haven’t young men always clamored to go to war?

We were also partaking in a fundamental kind of deception: the narrativization of time. And this is something that has ramifications in the realms of faith and literature, as well as everyday life.

For the past few days, I have been reading Judith Shulevitz’s 2011 nonfiction work The Sabbath World: Glimpses into a Different Order of Time. As part of her exploration of keeping Shabbat, Shulevitz discusses Israeli-raised sociologist Eviatar Zerubael and his book The Seven Day Dance, about which she comments: “His immersion in the religious calendar had helped him to invent a whole new field, the sociology of time… [in which] I discovered that time has an architecture, and that architecture has the power to affect us as deeply as the architecture of space does.”

The world of Shabbat and its catalogue of prohibitions and/or (depending on how you look at it) fulfillments is the world of communal participation and observance, in a world where time has not been so thoroughly individualized. In the book, Shulevitz iterates all the aspects of modernity, from factory industrialization to television and beyond, that get in the way of participation in religious time.

Religious time, on the other hand, operates differently: “Think of sacred holidays as wells, they tunnel down through temporal strata and allow the past to bubble into the present through the liquid medium of myth.”

Shulevitz may not have meant this, but her description is not all that far off from how we might also describe literary time, the immersion into verisimilitude that makes demands on both readers and writers.

And by this, I don’t merely mean the much-vaunted questions of distraction; the problem of continuous partial attention; the everpresence of the goddamn (forgive me) phones. (Though of course it is also all about those things.) The problems are in the books themselves, and in us.

I’ve described in this forum before about the tendency of so many contemporary novels to include elements of the fantastical or shocking, the easy opposition of characters and types, simply to propel the narrative forward expeditiously.

One paradigmatic example is Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, an otherwise measured portrait of a distressed midwestern family into which the author drops a fantastical subplot involving Internet criminals in Lithuania. That’s something that seems a lot more realistic to me now than it did in 2003, unfortunately, but which in terms of the novel’s framing seems like an effort to create narrative fascination simply by kind of trying to “blow stuff up.”

And as much as I hate to admit it, I like to blow stuff up, too! Whereas Shulevitz talks about the demands of contemporary life keeping us from the Sabbath (and in my telling, deep reading), what seems clear in 2026 is that on some level, this is what we want. As if by splitting time, skating over the surface of the things that made us uncomfortable–—like the possibility of my husband dying—my son and I might approach the heroic. I would call that dishonest time.

Similarly, we are bad and inattentive readers because we can be, propelled along from one easy plot point to the next. But by relying on sped-up and cut-apart time, you are—even if unwittingly—a step closer in spirit to those PR videos for the bombing of Iran intercut with images from action movies and video game tropes.

Nonetheless, there are still the hours to stare down. To care for someone sick, even when joyfully, is to watch the painful inching forward of time, just as it is to watch the day fall forward on a Sabbath without electronic amusements. And to bear the breadth of literature can be exacting, but a labor that ultimately satisfies.

That is the ringing conclusion of Hermione Hoby’s recent essay in The New Yorker, “‘Infinite Jest’ Has Turned Thirty. Have We Forgotten How to Read It?” A book with significant preoccupations about both accounting and addictions recovery, Hoby notes, in a paragraph that I meditate on, in my long long days:

“[Wallace]’s great novel proposed that the compulsive, addictive character of America, not least its addiction to entertainment, could best be resisted through the engaged reading of fiction. Here is a book about addiction that offers itself as a kind of counter-addiction, an example of the compounding value of sustained attention. The infamous length of “Infinite Jest” is, in this sense, a central feature of its ethic: not bigness as brag but duration as discipline. In a distractible age, Wallace made an argument for the long novel that is won simply by being heard.”

Caroline Langston was a regular contributor to Image’s Good Letters blog, and is writing a memoir about the U.S. cultural divide. She has contributed to Sojourners’ God’s Politics blog, and aired several commentaries on NPR’s All Things Considered, in addition to writing book reviews for Image, Books and Culture, and other outlets. She is a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, and a convert to the Eastern Orthodox Church. She lives outside Washington, D.C., with her husband and two children. 

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