Daily Nourishment for November 27, 2024: The Mixture of Piety and Blasphemy with Guidance from Lauren Winner
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 60 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 15 minutes
A Note from Lauren: This week's invitations will each consider a writer or visual artist with a late November birthday. Today is the birthday of James Agree, writer best known for his book about Alabama sharecropping families, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Pause.
Take a quiet moment with this extract from a letter from Agee (on the evening of his twenty-eight birthday) to Father Flye, the Episcopal priest who’d been chaplain at the school Agee attended from ages nine to 15, and with whom Agee kept up a correspondence until his death at 45:
“The world (and myself) seem to me this morning, in light of recent context, evil, exhausting and hopeless, not to mention nauseating and infuriating and incurable, yet I am thoroughly glad I am in it and alive.”
Read Agee’s words again, as you breathe; receive them.
Prompt.
Here is the opening of Agee’s novel A Death in the Family:
“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded: middle-sized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards, and porches. These were softwooded trees, populars, tulip trees, cottonwoods. There were fences around one or two of the houses, but mainly the yards ran into each other with only now and then a low hedge that wasn’t doing very well. There were few good friends among the grown people, and they were not poor enough for the other sort of intimate acquaintance, but everyone nodded and spoke, and even might talk short times, trivially, and at the two extremes of the general or the particular, and ordinarily nextdoor neighbors talked quite a bit when they happened to run into each other, and never paid calls. The men were mostly small businessmen, one or two very modestly executives, one or two worked with their hands, most of them clerical, and most of them between thirty and forty-five.
But it is of these evenings, I speak.”
(The novel goes on very beautifully and lyrically to indeed speak of the evenings.)
I find the opening of this novel particularly beautiful, and like to sit and savor the words. But you may wish to write in response to them. In the novel, Agee drew on his own Tennessee childhood. You might write of your childhood, beginning with a line of Agee’s, either “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee [or Asheville, North Carolina, or Ames, Iowa, or wherever your childhood summers were]” or “But it is of these evenings, I speak” and continuing to write for seven or ten minutes.
Practice.
In a 2006 essay about Agee in The New Yorker, David Denby wrote:
“The mixture of piety and blasphemy is what makes Agee’s fiction so moving, for here is a Christian author of self-punishing temperament who, at the same time, was awed by creation and could not allow a single aspect of sensuous experience to go unadmired—which meant, necessarily, loving what was raw and degraded as much as what was seemly and fine.”
Brainstorm a few objects, circumstances, places that are “raw and degraded,” and then a few that are “seemly and fine.” Then, for seven minutes, write your way toward loving both.
Want More?
Want more? Beth Kephart on craft lessons learned from Agee
Leslie Jamison’s wonderful essay about Agee
Workshops, Gatherings, & Resources
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Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Lauren Winner. Lauren Winner is a writer, professor, Episcopal Priest, & spiritual director.
Read Lauren’s full bio here.
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