She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood around her. Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn. Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away. A few evenings earlier, something had happened that had really scared her. Marcello had left, the television was off, the house was empty, Rino was out, her parents were going to bed. She was alone in the kitchen washing the dishes and was tired, really without energy, when there was an explosion. She had turned suddenly and realized that the big copper pot had exploded. Like that, by itself. It was hanging on the nail where it normally hung, but in the middle there was a large hole and the rim was lifted and twisted and the pot itself was all deformed, as if it could no longer maintain its appearance as a pot. Her mother had hurried in in her nightgown and blamed her for dropping it and ruining it. But a copper pot, even if you drop it, doesn't break and doesn't become misshapen like that. "It's this sort of thing," Lila concluded, "that frightens me. More than Marcello, more than anyone. And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.
Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read __ Good Man Is Hard to Find._ After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. __iss O__onnor,_ he said, __hy was the Misfit__ hat black?_ I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, __iss O__onnor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?_ __e does not,_ I said. He looked crushed. __ell, Miss O__onnor,_ he said, __hat is the significance of the Misfit__ hat?_ I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that__ what__ happening to the teaching of literature.
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Week before last I went to Wesleyan and read __ Good Man Is Hard to Find._ After it I went to one of the classes where I was asked questions. There were a couple of young teachers there and one of them, an earnest type, started asking the questions. __iss O__onnor,_ he said, __hy was the Misfit__ hat black?_ I said most countrymen in Georgia wore black hats. He looked pretty disappointed. Then he said, __iss O__onnor, the Misfit represents Christ, does he not?_ __e does not,_ I said. He looked crushed. __ell, Miss O__onnor,_ he said, __hat is the significance of the Misfit__ hat?_ I said it was to cover his head; and after that he left me alone. Anyway, that__ what__ happening to the teaching of literature.
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Do we take less pride in the possession of our home because its walls were built by some unknown carpenter, its tapestries woven by some unknown weaver on a far Oriental shore, in some antique time? No. We show our home to our friends with the pride as if it were our home, which it is. Why then should we take less pride when reading a book written by some long-dead author? Is it not our book just as much, or even more so, than theirs? So the landowner says, __ook at my beautiful home! Isn__ it fine?_ And not, __ook at the home so-and-so has built._ Thus we shouldn__ cry, __ook what so-and-so has written. What a genius so-and-so is!_ But rather, __ook at what I have read! Am I not a genius? Have I not invented these pages? The walls of this universe, did I not build? The souls of these characters, did I not weave?
To sense the peace of extinguished passionHappiness in not knowing the ultimate knowledge
He has the mistaken notion that a concern with grace is a concern with exalted human behavior, that it is a pretentious concern. It is, however, simply a concern with the human reaction to that which, instant by instant, gives life to the soul. It is a concern with a realization that breeds charity and with the charity that breeds action. Often the nature of grace can be made plain only by describing its absence.
In any case, you can't have effective allegory in times when people are swept this way and that by momentary convictions, because everyone will read it differently. You can't indicate moral values when morality changes with what is being done, because there is no accepted basis of judgment. And you cannot show the operation of grace when grace is cut off from nature or when the very possibility of grace is denied, because no one will have the least idea of what you are about.
Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other.