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This WFP is delayed due to Charter Internet hook-up problems. We'd say more, but we should hold off in Christian charity . . . at least until we see what Charter does today to remedy our problem.

Stoic's Porch
"Do your duty in all things. You cannot do more. You should never wish to do less." Robert E. Lee

More Anonymous Existentialist Ramblings
Flannery O'Connor is to modern literature what Marilyn Monroe is to the movie industry: A quick, shooting-star streak of brilliance in the 1950s that died out prematurely in the early 1960s, not yet forty years old. Although O'Connor snagged the public's attention with her fiction's intense violence, it was her deep and perplexing characters that caught the attention of the literature establishment.

Her most-celebrated story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” for instance, tells the story about a vacationing family that is murdered by an escaped convict who calls himself the Misfit. The story revolves around the Grandmother's relentless chatter, which ends up getting the family killed (shortly after running into the Misfit, she recognizes him and blurts out his identity–the Misfit acknowledges it and tells her it would've been better for the family if she hadn't recognized him). As the Misfit's crew takes one family member after another into the woods and shoots them, the Grandmother chatters away at the Misfit in hopes of saving her life, throwing all sorts of Christian clichés at him, which the Misfit (an intelligent, though warped, man) bats away with intellectual ease. The misshapen form of the characters' souls–the Grandmother's self-obsession and the Misfit's nihilistic detachment–are apparent, in their words and actions. The story ends when the Grandmother finally puts aside all her chattering clichés and speaks to the Misfit openly, authentically, and prepares to embrace him as one of her own children. The Misfit responds by pulling out his revolver and shooting her in the chest.

O'Connor later said the story's violence is merely a means of showing the hearts of the characters. The violence shakes the Grandmother (a woman with over seventy years of selfish armor surrounding her heart) and breaks open her chattering cover to expose her interior, like an earthquake breaks open a building. The action, O'Connor explained, is in the Grandmother's soul, not in the violence: “Now the lines of motion that interest the writer are usually invisible. They are lines of spiritual motion. And in this story you should be on the lookout for such things as the action of grace in the Grandmother's soul, and not for the dead bodies.”

As I read her fiction at first, I asked myself, “Did she entertain thoughts like those? She must have, or else she couldn't have come up with all the twisting and turning that goes on in her characters' dwarfed souls.” But I don't think she entertained those thoughts as much as she visited those thoughts by plunging herself into her character's soul until she could look from the inside at the essences swarming around the existential core. In order to do this, she would have had to put aside her own self and inner thoughts, so she could look deep into her characters' self and inner thoughts–just like any artist must do. She touched on this in her essay, “The Nature and Aim of Fiction,” when she wrote: “Usually the artist has to suffer certain deprivations in order to use his gift with integrity. Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and the practice of any virtue demands a certain asceticism and a very definite leaving-behind of the niggardly part of the ego.”

O'Connor's art was a self-emptying, self-forgetting, leaving-behind of the self. Through this self-emptying, she was able to see into the souls of others and produce characters whose psychological twistings are captivating because they reveal a jangle of essences that hollowly clang against one another in today's world, a world where essences have increased and multiplied and have all but killed the role of existence.

Might They Include Bloggers?
The saints would appear to share but a single trait: holiness. For the rest, their very appeal may lie at least somewhat in their unlikeness. They have been scholars and slaves, kings or queens and beggars, old men and young girls, the gregarious and solitaries who have dwelt in deserts and caves, the golden-tongued and those vowed to silence, the eccentrics and the wholly mainstream.
Ivan Innerst, Saints for Today, p. 11.

Strays
"The higher type of man clings to virtue, the lower type of man clings to material comfort. The higher type of man cherishes justice, the lower type of man cherishes the hope of favors to be received." Confucius

"Little progress can be made by merely attempting to repress what is evil; our great hope lies in developing what is good." Calvin Coolidge

"Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone." Frederic Bastiat

"Bring your desires down to your present means. Increase them only when your increased means permit." Aristotle

The Last Word
Machicolation: the opening in a wall through which fire, molten lead, stones, or other objects are dropped on besiegers or attackers. “Is a window in a high-rise fancy hotel a machicolation if used with water balloons?”

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