My daily quotes from Fred Buechner align with your journey in striking ways. I’ll share only one because it is a compliment you deserve. “THE WRITERS WHO get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.”
I'm glad to have these thoughts on radical contingency. I have spent so much of my life, as a classicist, in encounter with something like the opposite way of thinking about our lives, that I get a boost from reading your essay. It would be interesting, would it not, to discuss O'Connor's fiction within that framework. (If I remember correctly, the classicist and O'Connor friend Robert Fitzgerald oversaw her introduction to Greek tragedy.)
I will share an anecdote about my mother and FOC that can be enlisted as another example of that contingency. At the end of her first visit to Andalusia, Flannery walked Louise to her car and said to her, "I hope you'll come back as often as you can." As we all know (you, John, and I), that was not something she said to most people. The two young women hit if off — not inevitably, but contingently and happily.
My daily quotes from Fred Buechner align with your journey in striking ways. I’ll share only one because it is a compliment you deserve. “THE WRITERS WHO get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.”
this is just wonderful. thank you, Louisa! i might have to put that quote on my mirror
I'm glad to have these thoughts on radical contingency. I have spent so much of my life, as a classicist, in encounter with something like the opposite way of thinking about our lives, that I get a boost from reading your essay. It would be interesting, would it not, to discuss O'Connor's fiction within that framework. (If I remember correctly, the classicist and O'Connor friend Robert Fitzgerald oversaw her introduction to Greek tragedy.)
I will share an anecdote about my mother and FOC that can be enlisted as another example of that contingency. At the end of her first visit to Andalusia, Flannery walked Louise to her car and said to her, "I hope you'll come back as often as you can." As we all know (you, John, and I), that was not something she said to most people. The two young women hit if off — not inevitably, but contingently and happily.