The Holy Ghost of Ice
Just read another short story from the great Flannery O'Connor called "An Enduring Chill". It moves up near the top of my favorites of her stories. (I'm more of a "Habit of Being" man myself - the superb collection of her letters - but there are times I yearn for her fiction, if in small quantities - which I've tended to assume is because I'm not as holy as she was, Walker Percy being more my speed.)
This story was just pitch-perfect and the ending as satisfying as it was reassuring. She kept me off base constantly. A small example: when the dying atheist main character, Asbury, seeks intellectual stimulation on his death bed his mother wants a Methodist preacher who collects coins to visit. Asbury guffaws, and I instantly think it's because Asbury's naive mother was equating coin collecting with intellectual thought but Asbury laughs because he thinks his mother is trying to inflict someone spiritual on him. Read the story for an explanation of the title of this post.
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