Full of Grace

Nice article on Flannery O’Connor in the Washington Post. I’ve had an affection for O’Connor since I took a class on her in college. I had never read her before then and was just trying to fill up my course schedule. The Library of America edition of her works contains everything she wrote, I think.

This anecdote O’Connor recounts in a letter about a conversation on the Eucharist with writer and critic Mary McCarthy is great:

“Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the ‘most portable’ person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”