Learning from the Literary Device of Juxtaposition

A Close Reading of Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night

I learn best by example, and am constantly sending writers to their personal libraries to become students of what works and why. We can learn so much by doing what writers do best and paying attention to structure, story craft, transitions, flow and popping the hood on why we underlined that sentence or that story spoke to us so. 

So today I thought we might become students together, with a close reading of Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night. 

Tish is an Anglican priest whose writing speaks theological significance over everyday experiences, whether brushing your teeth or tucking in your kids at night, which is the focus of her chapter, titled “Give Your Angels Charge Over Those Who Sleep.” The book is structured on the traditional evening prayer of compline, so each chapter explores a line of this prayer. 

As she writes in this chapter’s open, Tish never gave much thought to angels, until she found herself as the new mother of her firstborn, asking for any kind of help she could get. She writes, 

“I rediscovered angels by putting a baby to sleep at night.” 

This immediately invokes the theme of this chapter, which is subtitled “Cosmos and Commonplace,” and I love this not least because I’m a sucker for alliteration, but because this so precisely names the range language must travel to reach from first-person singular to first-person plural. 

This is one of my leading principles in my editorial work: the task of the writer is to run the field from the particular to the universal, from the single story to the wide-ranging wisdom that holds true for all of us. Put another way, the writer’s task is to travel from particle to universe, from the smallest atom of being to the ever-expanding galaxies. 

This is no small task! Yet the distance traveled testifies to the power of words. So great a distance makes for a rigorous journey, and it’s no wonder writing can be such rigorous work. 

Writing that moves keeps these two polarities in balance. 

If writing is all cosmos and no commonplace, it has nothing to say to our weekday lives. Then it is powerless to integrate with the very real joys, longings, logistics, and annoyances of any given Thursday. There is no groundedness. 

If writing is all commonplace and no cosmos, it fails to usher us into a wider view where we can sense significance and the interconnection of things. It keeps our perspective closed-in, small, and fails to elevate our view into the greater “family of things,” as Mary Oliver writes. There is no sense of scope.

The two must be kept in balance, and this balance might be known as juxtaposition. Juxtaposition is simply the placement of two unlike things in close proximity, to highlight their contrast and provoke curiosity. The cosmos and the commonplace sidled up together, cheek to cheek. 

There’s nothing like juxtaposition to evoke astonishment. The more peculiar, the better. High contrast awakes the brain and kickstarts the questions. And good writing will always startle us awake.

Consider this juxtaposition:

“We are all helpless when we sleep. No matter how impressive we may be, in order to live we all have to turn off and be unconscious for about a third of our lives. Every day, whether we like it or not, we must enter into vulnerability in order to sleep.”

That is the power of perspective! Consider the difference between this and the banal “We’re all human. Everyone’s gotta sleep!” What startles here is the juxtaposition of all that we have in common against all our differences, as well as the zoomed out lens of our unconscious hours against the try-hard hours we tend to see ourselves in. 

Notice the reframing at work here—sleep, this absolute commonplace activity, is reframed as a portal, a deeply spiritual practice of vulnerability. 

I love where she takes it next:  

“In the Christian tradition, sleep has always been seen as a way we practice death…Our nightly descent into unconsciousness is a daily memento mori, a reminder of our creatureliness, our limitations, and our weakness. When we go to sleep, we get as close as we who are alive and healthy come to the helplessness of death. And we do it every night.” (Prayer in the Night, p. 89).  

Talk about juxtaposition—here, Tish takes a daily human reality and lets it jostle right up against an ultimate human reality. It’s stretching, uncomfortable even, and yet, it’s deeply memorable. 

I’m a huge proponent of this approach: take any idea—any idea—and take it all the way to its edge. This is a good way both to test the authenticity of an idea—does it still hold up, or start to crack, when taken to the nth degree? Is the claim still true, or does it need to be nuanced, revisited, re-investigated? It is also a magnificent way to put an exclamation point on an idea that is solid, and does indeed hold up in the deep end.

So if we’re talking about vulnerability, as Tish presents it, we have to talk about the ultimate vulnerability, which is death. Did you notice how your mind snapped to attention when she put it this way, so starkly? This is craft at work. And this is the power of juxtaposition—letting the cosmos bump up against the commonplace, so that we have the fullest view. 

One more underline from this chapter:

“Sleep is an act of surrender. It is a declaration of trust, admitting that we are not God (who never sleeps), and that that is good news.”  

See how a deeper meaning is drawn out of a shared experience here. Yes, Tish admits, the “helpless” rest of sleep is a human limitation. And yes—here she crafts her slant—it is good to release our try-hard tendencies at the end of the day, to let go of all we cannot control, and receive the gift of rest. It is good to rest in the smallness of our particularity, held as we are by the God who holds the cosmos. 

Until next time,

Take heart. Write on. You got this.

P.S. // A Blessing for Writers

SLANT LETTER is about both craft + soul care for the creative life. So for each issue, I want to speak this blessing for all of us anxious, ambitious, internet-exhausted writing folk.

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