Manishevitz do I like this "search inside" feature they have on so many books. It's perfect for bloggodocia too because although you can't cut & paste from the actual page it brings up, you can from the index listing the pages where your search item appears since it gives you the context around the search item in plain text.
So I found the following quote from Catholic author Ron Hansen in his book "A Stay Against Confusion : Essays on Faith and Fiction"
"Babette's Feast" merges incongruities, reconciles the irreconcilable. With Soren Kierkegaard, Karen Blixen argues against the either/or proposition that there is only one correct way to live one's life, that we are faced with a series of critical choices and if we choose wrongly we are lost. In her story the hedonistic general finds in the miracle of Babette's feast both ecstatic pleasure and a joyful, magnanimous God whom he otherwise could not imagined.One thing that interests me about Isak Dinesen is how her writing, especially in Out of Africa, is so damn lyrical. It's evocative and beautiful, like Updike's only without the sex. And while she tells good stories one could enjoy them strictly for the words & phrasings.
I think the rationalist likes stories, the romantic likes the poetry or melody. Flannery O'Connor, whose fiction I've never liked that much (though I love her letters, The Habit of Being), seems not all that lyrical but straight-ahead-always-going-forward-no-wasted-motion. The story is what is important for the holy (I don't mean that facetiously) O'Connor. Is the lushness of Updike or a Dinesen a form of debauchery? Is "good romantic" an oxymoron?
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