Flannery O'Connor's Adult Affirmation of Faith

The workshop room still held the morning chill when she came in with the notebook under one arm and her coat buttoned to the throat. She took the seat by the radiator and set the book square on the desk without opening it. Around her the others talked about line breaks and the weather in Chicago. She listened without joining in, then wrote a single line on the top page and closed the cover again.

I sat two rows over that semester. We had come to Iowa from different states and different churches, yet we both arrived early most days and left late. She never mentioned the notebook at first. Once, when the radiator hissed and the room emptied, she left it behind by mistake. I carried it to her in the hallway. She took it without thanks, only a quick nod, and the next morning she sat one seat farther away.

By midwinter the pages had thickened at the spine. She wrote in it after workshop, sometimes in the library stacks where the light was poor, sometimes on the bus back to the room she rented. The entries were short. She asked for the same things over and over: to be made an instrument, to be kept from pride, to finish one clean page before the cough returned. She never read them aloud.

One afternoon the instructor kept us late. When we finally rose, she stayed seated and opened the notebook again. I waited by the door. She wrote for perhaps ten minutes, then closed it and pressed both hands flat on the cover as if testing whether it would stay shut. Outside, snow had begun on the walk. She walked through it without raising her collar.

Spring brought longer days and longer silences in the room. She finished a story about a man who believed he could live without grace and then shot himself in the woods. The class praised the ending. She said nothing. That night the notebook lay open on her desk when I passed her window on the way to the post office. The page was mostly blank except for one sentence at the top: she wanted the work to lead somewhere outside herself. She underlined the word “outside” twice.

Summer came and most of the workshop left. She stayed. The heat made the pages stick together, so she wrote standing at the window with the notebook propped on the sill. I saw her there one evening when the streetlights came on. She wrote, then looked out at nothing for a long time, then wrote again. The next morning she mailed a letter to her mother and carried the notebook to Mass. She did not take it inside the church.

By fall the pages had begun to show the strain of constant handling. The corners softened and one edge tore. She taped it with brown paper from the grocery. She still brought it to every class, though she no longer opened it during the session. Instead she kept one hand resting on the cover while the others spoke. When someone asked her opinion she answered briefly and returned her hand to the book.

A letter arrived from home in October. She read it once on the steps outside the building, folded it, and placed it inside the notebook without marking the page. That week she missed two workshops. When she returned she looked thinner. She told no one why. The notebook, however, was thicker by several sheets. She had written on both sides now, the ink sometimes bleeding through.

One evening after the first hard frost I found her in the empty classroom. She had the notebook open and was copying a sentence from it onto a separate sheet. The copied line concerned the difficulty of believing when belief itself felt like a story someone else had already written. She folded the new page and put it in her coat pocket. The notebook she left on the desk for a moment while she went to the sink for water. I did not look at the open page. When she came back she closed it at once.