Moving the shelves required moving all the books and other things that had come to rest on them. Even though I donated most of my books months ago, there are many left, and I was grateful for that on Saturday afternoon. Books were stacked on the coffee table and on the couch, haphazard towers of print waiting for order to be imposed. Although I don’t follow my own guideline absolutely, I do tend to segregate the shelves based on whether the author is living or not. But that can be tricky: Does John Updike really belong on the same shelf with Walt Whitman? I don’t know.
I have no doubt, however, about Flannery O’Connor. I fell in love with her work via her short stories, which I read for the first time when I was in college. Her stories are about desperate people in desperate situations. Most of the desperation revolves around religion. For Flannery O’Connor, who spent most of her unfortunately brief life in rural Georgia, religion was the only theme worth the ink. Before you let that turn you off completely, consider this: Unlike today’s cheap renditions of what we’ve come to think of as “spiritual,” Flannery O’Connor appears to have actually read that big old book, and she appears to have understood it enough to inflict upon her characters an eternal moral dilemma that revolves primarily around reconciling one set of beliefs with another. Her work, like many of my relations, is funny in a way that I’ve yet to see anyone match, funny in that weird way that’s anything but.
Over the summer I read two of Flannery O’Connor’s novels: Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away. Before I read these books, my main impression of her wasn’t necessarily what she’d written but something she’d said. You haven’t experienced grotesque until you’ve read her short stories, and once an interviewer asked her why her characters and their lives were so outrageous. Well, she said, I think that when you’re talking to the hard of hearing, you need to shout.
If you ask me, that’s damn-near perfect.
But in Wise Blood – tucked in among the car whose color is referred to as “high rat” and the self-inflicted blindness of the main character, Hazel Motes – I found something that seems to have superseded, in my mind, her comment about the hard of hearing. In writing, in all types of writing, I think, the most difficult thing is moving forward. To do this effectively, you need to know how to write a good transition, one that seems as natural as a bookshelf being pushed across a floor from one room to another. There are millions of ways to accomplish this, of course. You could write about the changing seasons. You could write about aging by describing a person’s face. You could convey the years by focusing on how a man regards his wife.
But here’s another way to do it, taken from Wise Blood, which sits alongside Walt Whitman and Mark Twain:
Some time passed.
