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Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon. The crescent is very beautiful and perhaps that is all one like I am should or could see; but what I am afraid of, dear God, is that my self shadow will grow so large that it blocks the whole moon, and that I will judge myself by the shadow that is nothing.
[. . . .]
[A]ll my requests seem to melt down to one for grace--that supernatural grace that does what ever it does. My mind is in a little box, dear God, down inside other boxes inside other boxes and on and on. There is very little air in my box. Dear God, please give me as much air as it is not presumptuous to ask for. Please let some light shine out of the things around me so that I can. . . .Oh dear God I want to write a novel, a good novel.
[. . . .]
What I am asking for is really very ridiculous. Oh Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. But then God can do that--make a mystic out of cheeses.
I love all of this, but especially the first and last metaphors: an artist needs to be careful not to mistake her own massive shadow for substance, or to let it obscure what she's trying to communicate. But sometimes an artist--like God--can take a piece of cheese and turn it into a mystic.
6 comments:
I thought those O'Connor excerpts were incredibly pretentious and tiresome, and I stopped reading after 2 paragraphs.
But then, I've never read anything else she's written. (Is it always like that? Ugh.)
Historiann:
Well, they're private journal entries, written at about age 21. I wouldn't judge them by the same standards as prayers (or anything else) meant to be read publicly -- and actually, in one entry she has the same "ugh" reaction, rereading her old entries.
Her fiction is great: fierce and spare and strange--and stylistically very different from these entries.
I think that's actually why I liked these: they're so totally different from O'Connor's fiction, with a pleasing kind of gawky, adolescent posturing and vulnerability.
Magazine stunts like this one make me think that there is a reason these diary entries have never been published. One wonders if she's rolling in her own grave to know that the journal entries of her 21-year old self have now been published in The New Yorker.
At least I would be mortified if anything I wrote at age 21 was published!
Historiann:
For sure. I have a box full of journals that I kept from ages 16-26 that I lug with me on every move, but can't bear to open. Last time I did, I shut the offending volume right quick, and taped the box back shut.
BURN THEM!!!! Burn them now. What if you get brain damaged or die before you can see them burn?
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