A Flannery fix (updateD)

“If you live today you breathe in nihilism. In or out of the Church, it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now. With such a current to write against, the result almost has to be negative. It does well just to be.”

(August 28, 1955)

 UPDATE:

“I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with [a group of their friends]. [One woman had] departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual…. I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. The conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [the Big Intellectual] said…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 by able to say of it…except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”

(December 16, 1955)