- Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention by David Marno
The conceptual background against which Marno presents his exquisite and close readings of John Donne's Holy Sonnets is Augustine's caveat in the Confessions that "life is distraction." Marno leads us through the meanders of Donne's idea that a postlapsarian "scattering of the self" means that "being attentive in this life" is "a miracle comparable to the miracle . . . [of] resurrection." Donne's interest in "attention" and "distraction" was not limited to matters of religion. According to Marno, Donne did not associate his interest in the scattered self with the eschatological belief that the "dissolved parts of the human body" will in time be "miraculously reunited." Rather, the "transient and unsustainable . . . experiences of attentiveness belong to" and arise out of "this life." Donne was concerned with human agency as well as divine grace, just as he entertained both Machiavellian ideas of political power and Castiglione's sprezzatura. This complexity is framed within what Marno calls "practice[s] of grace," in which the individual's actions manifest control (whether political or religious) and yet are "marked by an absence, a hollow spot"—a space in which "agency is truncated" to allow the "other" to fill it and grace it with meaning. Marno understands Donne's religious lyrics as in pursuit of "holy attention" and aimed at eliciting in the reader a "disposition of receptivity" to grace. The poems ready the reader to experience, wholly within the confusing human realm of transience and distraction, moments of fleeting clarity. Hiram Haydn's narrative about the rise of modernity proposed an "ultimate desertion of the universal for the particular," whereas Marno shows how the poems of one early modern writer "guide, distract and often surprise the speaker's attention" in ways that aid readers to attain a passing but significant apprehension of the perfect universal inherent in distracting particulars.
Yaakov Mascetti is a lecturer in comparative literature at Bar-Ilan University and the author of Tokens of Love: Humanist Sign-Theory and Protestant Sacramentalism in Early Modern English Religious Lyrics (forthcoming).