The notes for the lecture had not changed in eight years, which was the problem.
Vera had been teaching the lecture on the sacred ordinary for eight years, and every year she refined it slightly, and the refining had produced not a better lecture but a different evidence of the same difficulty: she could not say the thing. She could indicate it. She could arrange words in its vicinity. But the words, when they arrived, were about the thing and not the thing, and she had been aware of this gap since before she was famous for pointing at it.
She was sixty-seven and had been pointing at this gap since her thirties, and she was tired, in the February way, the way that was not despair but something more patient than despair: a tiredness that had been with her long enough to stop being frightening.
A student had asked her in class last week what the sacred ordinary looked like, in practice. The student was sincere. They had read everything she'd written and wanted to know: in practice.
Vera had sat with the question for longer than was comfortable for a lecture room.
"It looks like this," she had finally said. "Right now. This."
The student had nodded slowly, the way students nod when they are being respectful while waiting for the answer.
This was the difficulty. The student was not stupid. The difficulty was that the thing she was pointing at was so completely present that it could not be seen as distinct from everything else, and so her pointing finger was taken as a metaphor for something more interesting somewhere else.
She had given up twice in thirty years. The first time, she was forty-one. She had submitted her resignation and then withdrawn it because she could not think of anything else to do with what she knew. The second time, she was fifty-eight. She had simply stopped writing for a year. During that year, the thing she had been trying to describe was present in every ordinary moment, patient as weather, and after a year of not writing she started writing again because not writing felt like lying.
She looked at the notes for the lecture.
Then she looked up from the notes, at the light on the surface of her desk, which was the color of nothing in particular and was nonetheless entirely itself.
She picked up her pen and wrote: tomorrow, begin here.