The Life You Save May Be Your Own: A Pilgrimage by Paul Elie, 472 pages
This
is a parallel biography of four prominent Catholic writers of the
mid-Twentieth Century: Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor,
and Walker Percy. This is a promising premise, for these four are very
different, but all were aware of each other, and some of them met or
corresponded, and all shared a milieux which included figures as
different as Robert Lowell and the Maritains, Evelyn Waugh and John
Kennedy Toole, the Berrigan brothers and Fulton Sheen.
The dominant theme of the book is present in its subtitle, "A Pilgrimage", with the author adopting the concept of "pilgrimage" as a quest for personal experience of the sacred. Unfortunately, the book never really penetrates into the interior of the subjects, seeming more concerned with external events than internal conversions and reconversions. Elie spends far more time, for example, discussing O'Connor's perspectives on race relations than her emotional struggles over suffering from a painful incurable degenerative disease. The reader will learn what these four did, without ever feeling what it was like to know them. That is a sad commentary indeed for a book about four authors possessed of such strong personalities.
The dominant theme of the book is present in its subtitle, "A Pilgrimage", with the author adopting the concept of "pilgrimage" as a quest for personal experience of the sacred. Unfortunately, the book never really penetrates into the interior of the subjects, seeming more concerned with external events than internal conversions and reconversions. Elie spends far more time, for example, discussing O'Connor's perspectives on race relations than her emotional struggles over suffering from a painful incurable degenerative disease. The reader will learn what these four did, without ever feeling what it was like to know them. That is a sad commentary indeed for a book about four authors possessed of such strong personalities.
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