We recently, upon recommendation, watched the film Paterson, and we loved it. It’s one of those movies that feels more like staring at a painting for two hours, rather than being strung along a narrative plot-line. (Not that there’s anything wrong with plot; I just don’t prefer it these days.) Nothing in Paterson is really discussed in the movie itself; its themes are remarkably silent. And one of these silent themes is repetition. In fact, I think its the main theme. From the wake-up scenes, to the walks, to the conversations with the supervisor, to the straightening of the mailbox. Even the appearance of numerous twins throughout the film would be an otherwise bizarre occurrence were it not there alongside all these other repetitions.
Of course, that doesn’t mean that new and beautiful things don’t come out of these repetitions. But repetition is the water we are swimming in — and being called to swim in more joyfully.
Too much further explanation of the film, in this case, would risk reducing some of its magic. The only reason I wanted to put a roof nail in it was because of a quote from Edward Mendelson that I read in an interview with Alan Jacobs today.
The quote comes from Mendelson’s Early Auden, which I happily pulled off the shelf this afternoon. Mendelson is explaining a significant change of view for W. H. Auden, beginning with his poem “A Summer Night.” Up to this point Auden had, like just about everyone else, viewed repetition as a curse, “a mortifying compulsion, a doom to which everyone was condemned and which heroes struggled to escape.”
All this changed with in “A Summer Night.” Repetition now became the ground of memory, the medium of love, and for the first time Auden praised events that occurred a second time.
This was a prodigious step, made in opposition to the reigning assumptions of almost two centuries of philosophy, psychology, and art. In romantic thought, repetition is the enemy of freedom, the greatest force of repression both in the mind and in the state. Outside romanticism, repetition has a very different import: it is the sustaining and renewing power of nature, the basis for all art and understanding. The detailed history of repetition deserves a book to itself; here it will suffice to note that repetition lost its moral value only with the spread of the industrial machine and the swelling of the romantic chorus of praise for personal originality. Until two hundred years ago virtually no one associated repetition with boredom or constraint. Ennui is ancient; its link to repetition is not. The damned in Dante’s Hell never complain that their suffering is repetitive, only that it is eternal, which is not the same thing. … When [Goethe’s] Faust asks Mephistopheles if there is a way to regain youth without resorting to witchcraft, he is advised to take up the repetitive life of a rural farmer, cultivating his garden. This is precisely what Voltaire’s Candide learned to accept only a few decades before, but Faust will have none of it. He wants no reliable satisfactions of any kind, only continual change and a perpetual unease that will call into being ever new interests and desires. He accepts a wager with the devil which he can lose only when he asks the passing moment to linger, to repeat itself in the next moment. For Faust, accepting repetition means accepting death.
I didn’t start reading until my later 20’s. Until that time, I’m certain I could count on one hand the number of books I had actually read. Naturally, there was a lot to catch up on, and one of the first books on my list was G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. If I were going to recommend only one chapter in that book, it would be “The Ethics of Elfland.”
Here is a key passage from that chapter:
All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. … Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical ENCORE. Heaven may ENCORE the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.
Exulting in the monotony — not because we are limited, not because nature says we have to, but because it is “the ground of memory, the medium of love.”
Paterson emulates this wonderfully.