“To Keep My Memory Alive and Healthy”

Last updated on: March 17, 2017 at 2:57 pm by Joseph Susanka

“To Keep My Memory Alive and Healthy” 2017-03-17T14:57:39-06:00 Joseph Susanka

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It is a pity I can’t receive my own letters. If they produce as much wholehearted approval at their destination as they do at their source, they should indeed be able to keep my memory alive and healthy.

— Flannery O’Connor

What a great quote. Yes, as a die-hard and dyed-in-the-wool O’Connorite, I suppose it’s only fair to admit that I’m pre-disposed to enjoy this sort of thing. But it’s just so quintessentially O’Connor: smart, sarcastically self-deprecating, and with a hard core of truth and insight into human nature that we would all like to ignore, but which we can’t help but recognize in ourselves at the same time.

And now, thanks to Emory University, we can expect to see more of this sort of thing. A lot more. Via the New York Times, by way of Father Steve Grunow’s Facebook page:

A trove of Flannery O’Connor’s literary drafts, journals, letters and personal effects, long hidden from all but a few scholars, has been acquired by Emory University here and will soon be made available to the public, shedding new light on one of the most influential American writers of the postwar era.

The acquisition was announced on Tuesday afternoon by Emory and the Mary Flannery O’Connor Charitable Trust, the literary estate of the author, who died in 1964 at 39. A number of experts on O’Connor’s life and work said that the collection, which fills more than 30 boxes, was so big that it would take time to evaluate the ways it would deepen our understanding of O’Connor. But their excitement was palpable.

As is mine; as is mine. Palpable, I say!

More coolness from Emory; this time, in video form:

A line from that Times story that really jumped out at me:

O’Connor once predicted that interest in her life story, which she considered mundane, would be scant, because “lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy.”

A life lived in nothing but that small a physical space might not “make exciting copy,” as O’Connor succinctly (and dismissively) puts it. But as she herself showed, the spaces in which the mind can live — and from whence it can communicate — are not limited to such narrow confines as houses and chicken coops and the yards between.

And now, thanks to Emory, we get to explore in even more detail that vast and insightful space in which she lived her life. That should be more than enough to keep her memory alive and healthy.

Draft pages with handwritten corrections of Flannery O’Connor’s first novel, “Wise Blood,” published 1952, with a pair of eyeglasses and a typewriter ribbon. (Photo used with the permission of Emory University and MARBL)

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