A Good Grace is Hardly Found

[alice wellintown]

So, I must admit that I failed, failed fairly miserably to explain
Grace to a room packed with non-Christian kids from the emerging
economies come to Brooklyn to be hipsters, who stand about like so
many clean, somehow antithetically, younger brothers incarcerated in
my Sonny's Blues Project, and that I have, when the tightening
sphincter, or the tightening tourniquet bubbling a dragon under my
skin pierced by a China white butterfly's pin, chased Grace under fire
with blood on the wire, there, where a good man is hard, where a hard
man is good, where the finds are fine and a heart is a heart
like...like, whatever...is this Flannery
O'Connor...like...saying....like...Grace?

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to
stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls
at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today
looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is
the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether,
and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a
novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He
wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock
innocence.”

“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is
not very willing to support it, but most people think of these stories
as hard, hopeless and brutal.”

“Our age not only does not have a very sharp eye for the almost
imperceptible intrusions of grace, it no longer has much feeling for
the nature of the violences which precede and follow them.”