Quote wall: Flannery O'Connor

Once upon a time, I had a bulletin board above my desk. Any time I found a quote that taught me something, or that I thought might have something for me when I was capable of receiving it, I'd pin it there.

I'm in a different room of the house now, a smaller room, where there just isn't room for a bulletin board above my desk. I still collect little quotations and things that I think might prove useful to me, though. These days they mostly get logged in a journal and forgotten about, since I don't often return to the journals when I've finished them.

The one I want to share here comes from a book I've not yet read, but which sits on my shelf waiting for space to open up in the current rotation. I encountered it instead in a movie. Thanksgiving week I traveled in the rain to a theater nearly an hour's drive away to see a movie, by myself, that nobody else was much interested in. The movie in question was the Bruce Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere. (I think the official title is Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, which makes me want to revisit all of the rock biopics I've ever seen and retitle them accordingly. Cash: Walk the Line. Charles: Ray. Dylan: A Complete Unknown. Yankovic: Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. Etc.)

I was going to spend a few more paragraphs here on all the trepidation I had about this movie, but I can't in good conscience do it. Sure, I figured it might not be very good, but I like Bruce Springsteen, and I was interested in the story behind the making of Nebraska. And the truth is I just absolutely loved the movie. I sat very close to the screen, not a single other moviegoer to interrupt the view, and just let the movie swallow me up.

I'd gone in expecting the usual biopic beats — the origin story, the rise, the crisis, the triumph, etc. — but instead I got a largely quiet and interior movie about an artist's mental health struggles, his creative crisis, his battle to hold to an unpopular vision, his work to understand generational trauma and his place in the world. I was pretty well primed for all of this — these last couple of years have destabilized so much of my inner landscape — so whatever flaws might have been on the screen there, I honestly wouldn't have noticed. I just sat there, feeling seen.

Anyway, right, the quotation. There's a moment in the film when a friend sits with Springsteen — that's another thing, man, the movie just shares a beautiful example of close male friendship and platonic love — and listens as Bruce says he doesn't know what he's doing. And the friend quotes Flannery O'Connor, and I remember thinking, oh, please, let this be a real quote and not something they invented to support this movie.

Later on I searched for the quote, and I found it. It's from a novel called Wise Blood, and while I can't tell you a thing about the context, I can tell you the novel is sitting in a short stack of books I plan to read very soon. Whatever its context, the quote works beautifully on its own.

Here you go:

Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. ... Nothing outside you can give you any place. ... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.

—Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood