Flannery O'Connor on stifling writers

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

                                                                                                         

 Flannery O’Connor, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” in Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose  (1969, Garrar, Straus and Giroux, 84-84)

Story-telling, teaching and love

"[The] thing that has the capacity to make storytelling glorious is love. Just as great teaching is loving a subject in the presence of students who are also loved, so it is with story. A man who loves the story he is telling, and loves the people he is telling it to, is a formidable bard. Something mysterious happens when story-grip sets in. One man writes a disheveled story, breaks numerous rules, and gets away with it. Another writes a story with every hair in place, prim hands folded on the lap, and it stinks. Then someone else writes a textbook example of doing everything right, and it works anyway. Failures of story-telling are at some level a failure to love. Successes in story-telling are examples of love triumphing."

Douglas Wilson, “Love Story,” March 8, 2010  (www.credenda.org/index.php/From-the-Vaults/love-story.html)

On accepting our losses courageously (and hairlessly)

I love St. Francis de Sales. Although his classic, Introduction to the Devout Life, was originally published in 1609, I continue to find in it grace for living today. But maybe the real reason I like this book so much is that it makes me laugh. I don’t know if St. Francis deliberately sprinkled his writing with jokes, or if it’s the clash of cultures and centuries that so tickles my funny bone, but his metaphors and comparisons are often so strange that I’m frequently doing double-takes and asking, is this monk crazy? Or sometimes his analogies are just slightly askew, and I wonder, did he really mean that? 

Here’s one of those passages that caused a double-take. The subject is serious, but…

“If you meet with losses that impoverish you either very much or a little, as in the case of tempests, fires, floods, droughts, thefts, or lawsuits, that is the proper time to practice poverty by accepting your losses meekly and patiently and by courageously submitting to such impoverishment. Esau presented himself to his father with his hands covered with hair, and Jacob did the same, but because the hair on Jacob’s hands did not belong to his skin but only to his gloves it might be taken away without injuring his skin. On the contrary, the hair on Esau’s hands adhered to his skin, which was naturally very hairy, so if anyone had tried to pluck it off it would have hurt him and he would have cried out, been angry, and defended himself. Thus when our worldly goods cleave to our hearts, what complaints, what trouble and what impatience do we fall into if a storm, a thief, or a cheat takes any part of them away from us. When our goods do not cleave to our hearts and we think of them only because of such care as God wants us to have for them, we don’t lose reason or peace of mind if they are taken away from us. Hence the difference as to clothing between men and beasts. The garments of beasts, namely, their skins, adhere to their flesh, while those of men are merely put on them and can be taken off at will.”

Thinking in the same logical vein, I wonder if women are better able to accept losses than men because women shave their legs.

Ladies and other unskillful persons

I love dictionaries. I love to just open one to any random page and make choice discoveries. My all-time favorite is the Oxford English Dictionary. Fortunately I live close enough to a university library to be able to browse at my heart’s content.

Right now I am re-reading that fascinating book by Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (1998). Among other fascinating facts and anecdotes, Winchester provides some of the history of English dictionaries. (I realize this may not be fascinating to everybody, but it is to me.)

We learn that in 1604, a schoolmaster named Robert Cawdrey published “the very first true monolingual English dictionary,” thus providing “a pivotal moment in the history of English lexicography.” (Now, is that fascinating or what?) It was a small book with only some 2500 entries that didn’t attempt to cover the field. He entitled it A Table Alphabeticall…of hard unusual English Words.

The quote from the preface that I want to share has less to do with a fascination for dictionaries than with cultural attitudes toward women. In the preface to his dictionary of hard words, Crawdrey notes that the book is chiefly “for the benefit & help of Ladies, gentlewomen or any other unskilful persons, Whereby they may more easilie and better vunderstand many hard English wordes, which they shall heare or read in the Scriptures, Sermons or elsewhere, and also be made able to vse the same aptly themselves.”

If it weren’t so funny, I’d probably be mad.

I’m glad I live in the 21^st century.

Quote: Rainer Maria Rilke

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves... Don't search for answers now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

From Letters to a Young Poet

On stupidity

“…the stupider one is, the closer one is to reality. The stupider one is, the clearer one is. Stupidity is brief and artless, while intelligence wriggles and hides itself. Intelligence is a knave, but stupidity is honest and straightforward.”

Spoken by Ivan in The Brothers Karamasov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

What a relief to know that.

Messages from another world

When Hal was about 9 years old, his parents gave him several sets of encyclopedias, rejects from the Christian school to which they had been donated. Too out-dated for the school to use, they provided hours of fascinating reading for a young boy curious about all of life. We recently came across these volumes while sorting through the boxes in the old family home. They make even more fascinating reading today, almost seeming like messages from another world.

The five-volume American Educator Encyclopedia has the ambitious subtitle, “A Thoroughly Modern Work Designed to Meet the Needs of Every Age,” (1936. Wallsworth D. Foster, ed., Chicago: The United Educators, Inc.). The following come from the sections on commerce, religion and war and show a certain idealism that was just beginning to fade in the time of the rise of Hitler.

Commerce:  “In commerce there is an exchange of property, in which each party gains what he desires. But commerce is no longer the mere barter of savages. It is a vast system is which all the world shares. It helps to make prices and wages more equal. It also keeps them more fixed, for, if one group will not pay a fair price, the goods may be sent elsewhere….It brings people all over the world into greater sympathy with each other, and gives them more knowledge of each other” p. 433).

Religion: “All men are religious. No tribe has been found so low in savagery or barbarism that it did not acknowledge some relation to a supreme being and in a crude way try to give expression to that relationship” (p. 3046).

War: “…though an enemy may be starved into surrender, wounding, except in battle, mutilation and all cruel and wanton devastation are contrary to the rules of war, as are also bombarding an unprotected town, the use of poison and the employment of torture to extort information from an enemy. Works of art and the industries of peace are usually considered as exempt from destruction. The World War, however, showed that in actual conflict all these rules may be disregarded by a wanton adversary….The supreme problem before civilization at the present time is not the mitigation, but the abolition of war” (p. 3802).

Would that the results of commerce and globalization were greater sympathy, but it seems that the supreme problem before us is still the abolition of war.

Quote by Dorothy Day

"The older I get, the more I meet people, the more convinced I am that we must only work on ourselves, to grow in grace. The only thing we can do about people is to love them."

From All the Way to Heaven: The Selected Letters of Dorothy Day, 2010.

On reading the Bible aloud

A description from Alan Patton’s novel, Cry the Beloved Country (1942)


“Msimangu opened the book, and read to them first from the book. And Kumalo had not known that his friend had such a voice. For the voice was of gold, and the voice had love for the words it was reading. The voice shook and beat and trembled, not as the voice of an old man shakes and beats and trembles, nor as a leaf shakes and beats and trembles, but as a deep bell when it is struck. For it was not only a voice of gold, but it was the voice of a man whose heart was golden, reading from a book of golden words. And the people were silent, and Kumalo was silent, for when are three such things found in one place together?”

Quote by Carl Sandburg

"I never made a mistake in grammar but one in my life and as soon as I done it I seen it."

"My candle burns..."

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

My candle burns at both ends.
It will not last the night.
But, ah my foes, and oh, my friends,
It gives a lovely light.

Quote: Robert Frost

The Secret

We dance around in a ring and suppose,
But the secret sits in the middle and knows.

Quote: Kathleen Norris

From Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life (2008, Riverhead Books):

“Even as I discovered my vocation as a writer, I had to struggle to maintain the boring work habits necessary for nourishing it” (41).

“The concept of sin does not exist so that people who may need therapy more than theology can be convinced that they are evil and beyond hope. It is meant to encourage people to believe that they are made in the image of God and to act accordingly. Hope is at the heart of…the ever present possibility of transformation” (114).

“When the Dalai Lama was asked for advice about how people could improve their spiritual lives, he laughed and said that it was obvious: Eat less, don’t stay up so late, and sleep more” (193-194).

Quote: G. K. Chesterton

"Perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, 'Do it again' to the sun; and every evening 'Do it again' to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never gotten tired of making them." (From Orthodoxy)