The coffee maker has grown sluggish in middle age. I turn it on first thing in the morning; it responds willingly at first, perking away, but then, with a sigh, it slows down, and the light will go off, a few ounces brewed and the rest of the water languishing in the receptacle. I don’t always notice at first. In fact, if it has succeeded in brewing most of the pot, I might not notice the lapse until the next day, when I’ve filled the receptacle to the brim once again while yesterday’s neglected water lingers somewhere in the works and sends the new coffee dripping down in a thin stream over the woodwork, rolling sideways behind the stovetop to drip down on that side, too. Even then, I might not notice until I open the white-painted cabinet door under the stove to take out a pan and see long yellow streaks on the inside. Poor housekeeping, that. By the time I see it, yesterday’s coffee is etched indelibly into the paint. All my laggardly scrubbing leaves a lingering trail behind.

While I’m packing the lunches or unloading the dishwasher, I try to glance at the coffee pot, to encourage it. With each press of the button, it leaps back into life, begins to brew, and then stops, wandering off like a daydreaming child that the coach has been forced to deploy in midfield while the more focused children eagerly follow the ball.

This often happens when sleep has eluded me the night before. If I wake up too early, I might start the rosary for the next day; but I soon fall asleep, only to wake up again and pray some Hail Marys without any idea what bead I was on or what mystery I was praying. Such inattentiveness might be expected in moments like that–although when I’m really awake, those late-night rosaries are the best ones I pray. I might notice, for instance, how the sweetness of Mary’s greeting breaks into the silence imposed in Elizabeth’s house by the muting of Zechariah. No wonder the babe is attentive and leaping for joy! But if God has to wake me up to get my attention, how inattentive must I be during the day? I am like that coffee pot, leaping at once when I’m called on to brew; I start out well, offering whatever is first on my mind, trying to keep track of all the prayers people have asked me to say. But I soon wander off, growing sluggish, abandoning the task of prayer almost before I’ve begun. Even the short consecration I memorized last spring and try to say every day can be too much to accomplish in one go.

How does one clean a coffee pot? The internet says to brew several cycles with equal parts water and vinegar. I put it off, hoping to do it when no one is home; after all, no one wants to infuse the air of their kitchen with warm vinegar. And perhaps it’s too late for my old machine. For inside its walls are black scales, the dregs of coffee long past; in my mind, I see Jean Valjean carrying Marius through the sewers of Paris, afraid to look up. If the coffee can do this to the pot, what must it do to our insides?

And yet the cup of coffee beside me right now tastes perfectly fine. On Fridays, I like to drink from the mug with the crack in the glaze; if you fill it too full it will leak, but if you fill it only halfway, you can still use it. It reminds me that I, too, am a flawed vessel.

Because even a sluggish pot still makes coffee; and even a weak prayer life is a turning toward God. After all, if a man has a hundred coffee pots and one of them wanders away, spilling its gold down the cabinet doors, won’t He leave the ninety-nine that are working (or praying) and tenderly start the brew cycle again and again?

My most recent dive into In Search of Lost Time began in 2020, when my daughter was reading Swann’s Way for a college class. I picked up her book and started enthusing about the moment when the narrator, world-weary and sad, traces his first taste of the madeleine dipped in lime blossom tea to his Aunt Leonie’s bedroom in childhood. Suddenly, the whole of Combray, where he and his family spent their Easter holidays, rises up like a stage set around him. And while the line quoted at the top of my site—reading is on the threshold of the spiritual life—is actually from one of Proust’s two essays on reading, the world of the Search seems to hover around in that earlier piece: it’s in the bedclothes, the pictures, even the view from the window. In that essay, Proust himself seems to stand on the threshold of claiming his mature voice. But in a larger sense, I think the word “threshold” refers to that moment of recognition that leads us to plunge fully into the work. For me and for so many others, that moment comes when the madeleine calls forth Proust’s theory of involuntary memory. That’s when I said to myself, “I’ve always felt that, but I didn’t know how to express it.” Such moments, for Proust, become a jumping-off place for the reader’s own self-exploration. As for what he actually meant by the spiritual life, perhaps it occurs when something you’re reading prompts in you the kind of deep thought that makes you stare into space, the book and the time and all your devices forgotten.

I finished the book for the third time in our hotel room on a visit to our daughter during the Covid-deformed spring of 2021. She was busy that night, so my husband and son and I had a drink at the bar, where I reminded them that the novel ends with the unsteady old Duc de Guermantes, now in thrall to the former Odette de Crecy, tottering on giant’s legs reaching downward through so many lifetimes. That moment now is encoded for me in the book, which I fully intend to revisit. After all, if I am ever to cross that spiritual threshold, it will be on such tottering legs.

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