A Story Well Lived

Thomas P. Balazs

On the last day of class this semester, I was explaining to my fiction-writing students the difference between short stories and life, illustrating a point about what the writer Edgar Allan Poe once called “unity of effect.”

In his review of Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe argues that a well-wrought story depends upon “unity of effect”—meaning that everything works toward a single impression. “If wise,” Poe writes, “he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect.”

Poe’s language can be abstract, his sentences Byzantine, so I like to ground this idea in a clear, concrete image.

A well-wrought story, I told my students, operates like the workings of an old-fashioned watch. If you remove the tiniest gear from its mechanism, it will not run. Likewise, if you insert into the clockwork anything that doesn’t belong, it won’t work. A great story functions the same way. You won’t find anything—character, scene, dialogue, or description—that doesn’t serve a dramatic purpose.

This is not, however, the way real life usually works, I pointed out.

On the contrary, 99 percent of our lives are filled with trivial, uninteresting moments that, if we were an editor of existence, we would excise for the sake of story.

We spend our days sleeping, eating, obtaining and preparing food, using the bathroom, dressing, earning a living or preparing to earn a living, mindlessly entertaining ourselves, or performing other necessary but unremarkable tasks.

I wasn’t trying to give my students lessons in living but in fiction writing, yet one of them told me later that the class had made her “want to lead a more vibrant life.”

She didn’t explain exactly what she meant, but I imagine she wanted to alter the calculus, to reduce the percentage of trivial moments, to increase the percentage of meaningful ones.

And that, of course, is what we all want. But how do we get there?

In his infamous 1873 “Conclusion” to his art study, The Renaissance, the English critic Walter Pater posed this same question and offered a solution.

“A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life,” he wrote. “How shall we … be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?”

Pater’s answer was that we should pursue “great passions,” though he was careful to assert that “wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake,” most reward us with “this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness.”

(Nonetheless, many read his work as advocating hedonism, which is why this conclusion was omitted from the second edition of the book.)

Pater’s essay made a strong impression on the young men of his day. His most famous follower, Oscar Wilde, exemplified the consequences of this philosophy both in his great novella The Picture of Dorian Gray and in his own short, brilliant, tragic life. Pater and Wilde were voices of ideas that drove what some call the era of Victorian decadence—but, obviously, such notions still exert great influence in the wider culture.

But Orthodox Judaism, and Hasidic thought in particular, has a different answer to achieving the “variegated, dramatic life.”

Instead of sending us out in pursuit of sensation and experience, Judaism imbues with kedushah what would, otherwise, be routine, robotic moments. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson alludes to this in his famous Ma’amer “Basi L’gani” when he explains that our mission as Jews is to transform the “shtuyot” of the world into “shtuyout kedoshim,” i.e. “holy foolishness.” By foolishness he doesn’t mean stupidity, but mundanity. It’s a reversal of Pater’s hierarchy in which the individual achieves transcendence by engaging with powerful, even exotic, external stimuli; instead, the individual draws on his connection to higher spiritual realms to elevate mundanities.

Sometimes this results in practices that can strike the uninitiated as shocking and ridiculous. For example, I recently learned that not only are we supposed to cut our nails in a specific order, but we are to do so only on certain days. At first blush, such “restrictions” seem, to use a technical term, nuts.

I mean, some rules make obvious sense. Making a blessing before and after a meal, for example, imbues the activity with gratitude, and we’re not so far away from times when food was an uncertain resource that it’s hard to understand the need to be thankful. But that sort of justification is less clear when we come to laws about cutting fingernails or showering or tying shoes (yes, there are rules for that too).

But when you think about what’s at stake, the 99 percent of life that’s otherwise bereft of meaning, suddenly these “rules” take on a new significance.

Now you can go on to Chabad.org to discover not only the proper order and days but also the underlying kabbalistic reasons for why you should cut the nails on your ring finger first and your pinky last, why you shouldn’t cut your nails on Thursday, and why you should be extra careful with the trimmings.

But that’s not what I’m getting at.

What I’m getting at is this. When I cut my nails in an ordinary way, I’m just trimming my nails. It means nothing. It’s just something I have to do sometimes.

But when I do it in a halakhic way, I’m reminding myself that I live in an ordered, meaningful universe and thus even a simple act of grooming takes on importance in the story of my life. It contributes to the “unity of effect,” which is my consciousness not only of Hashem’s presence in the universe but also of my role in the grand story He is writing.

Does that mean without cutting your nails in the proper order, your life is meaningless? No, of course not. But you may have lost an opportunity to flesh out your story.

Fortunately, in Judaism, if you miss one opportunity there are many more to come.

Of course, even in Jewish life, there are “filler” moments, moments we cannot, or at least do not, redeem—times when our minds are occupied with the trivial or mundane or maybe by nothing at all, like when you’re driving down the road and suddenly realize you haven’t been paying attention and wonder why you haven’t crashed.

But by bestowing upon even the most ordinary tasks opportunities for connection with Hashem, Judaism offers us ways to be “present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy.”

In a Jewish life, as in a well-written story, everything has its place; nothing is extraneous.