Quote of the Day (James Kilpatrick, on a Blue Ridge ‘Etched Impression of a Snowy Night’)

“Nothing much happens up here in the Blue Ridge mountains—only life, birth, death, law, philosophy, the harvest of a summer, the etched impression of a snowy night.”—Conservative columnist, editor and TV commentator James Kilpatrick (1920-2010), The Foxes’ Union (1977)

Quote of the Day (Francois Mauriac, on Winter in the French Countryside)

“Winter in the country among the fields does not have any of the cloistered or even shrouded feeling I had imagined. The countryside in no way reminds one of animals that hibernate until the spring. Everything stays awake. The smell of the buds betrays a snap in gestation. The comradeship of hunger unites the birds who give no thought to love. Every morning, a pipit flies against my bedroom window and pecks at it furiously. I see her soft yellow breast from close at hand. She is not trying to get in, because the open window does not attract her. Is she, like the lark, tempted by the mirror, obsessed by the mystery of the transparent?”—French novelist and Nobel Literature laureate Francois Mauriac (1885-1970), “On Nature,” in Second Thoughts: Reflections on Literature and on Life (1961)

Quote of the Day (Flannery O’Connor, With a Scene in a Southern Barn)

“It was a large two-story barn, cool and dark inside. The boy pointed up the ladder that led into the loft and said, ‘It’s too bad we can’t go up there.’

“ ‘Why can’t we?’ she asked.

“ ‘Yer leg,’ he said reverently.

“The girl gave him a contemptuous look and putting both hands on the ladder, she climbed it while he stood below, apparently awestruck. She pulled herself expertly through the opening and then looked down at him and said, ‘Well, come on if you’re coming,’ and he began to climb the ladder, awkwardly bringing the suitcase with him.

“ ‘We won’t need the Bible,’ she observed.

“ ‘You never can tell,’ he said, panting. After he had got into the loft, he was a few seconds catching his breath. She had sat down in a pile of straw. A wide sheath of sunlight, filled with dust particles, slanted over her. She lay back against a bale, her face turned away, looking out the front opening of the barn where hay was thrown from a wagon into the loft. The two pink-speckled hillsides lay back against a dark ridge of woods. The sky was cloudless and cold blue.”—American short-story writer and novelist Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964), “Good Country People,” originally published in Harper’s Bazaar, June 1955, republished in her short-story collection A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955)

As last week’s PBS documentary Flannery made clear, stories such as “Good Country People” were inspired in part by O’Connor’s life on her family’s 550-acre dairy farm in Milledgeville, GA, where she also raised peacocks and chickens.

I have not had the chance to visit that farm, but on the two occasions when I was in Savannah, I made it a point to see her birthplace on Lafayette Square. This childhood home was just across from the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. That building was not just a weekly but daily presence in her life, as the young girl could view its steeple and hear the tolling of its bells from her room. Anyone trying to understand the strong feelings about God expressed with oblique but unusual force in her fiction and more conventionally if pungently in her letters would do well to go to this neighborhood.

For any writer, O’Connor’s life is an inspiration, proof of the power of forsaking self-pity, even in the face of overwhelming obstacles (in her case, the lupus that hobbled and eventually killed her at age 39), through iron commitment to work.

Quote of the Day (Richard Brookhiser, on Rural Winters)

“If you live in the woods for a few winters you learn how beautiful that season is.  When the trees are leafless you can appreciate their bark and their bending.  Spring, summer, and fall are fashion shows; winter is a parade of nudes.  Creatures without roots are also worth studying.  Birds sing less but they are seen more; animals leave tracks like sociologists' flow charts. It’s a hard sell to the public though. The warmest parka is no match for the USVI. So the resort sails over the cliff, hoping to touch down briefly on Valentine’s Day.”— Richard Brookhiser, “Country Life: Closing Time,” National Review, January 26, 2015

Well, there’s more suburban New Jersey than the deep rural life that Brookhiser is celebrating (sort of) in this quote, but you catch the drift—so to speak.