Besides the Bible by Gibson Dan;Green Jordan;Pattison John;

Author:Gibson, Dan;Green, Jordan;Pattison, John; [Pattison, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2023-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

THE COLLECTED STORIES

OF EUDORA WELTY

essay by Karen Spears Zacharias

My high school English teacher, Marjorie Drury, gave me a copy of Welty’s One Writer’s Beginning, perhaps the thinnest autobiography ever written by a writer. I was mesmerized, in part because of my admiration for Ms. Drury, a beguiling teacher who sparked devotion from an ignorant child. But mostly it was because of Welty’s love for the written word:

I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me—and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting—into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting to school. I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned “Now I lay me” and the Lord’s Prayer and your father and mother’s name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.

Welty’s words fling me back to those moments when I sat at a desk at Edgewood Elementary School, my patent leathers swinging inches above the linoleum, grasping a fat pencil between white-nailed forefinger and thumb as I tried with all my might to copy those swirly letters running the entire length of the chalkboard. I, too, loved the alphabet. Even before I could read a book, I knew that letters were the dangly golden keys to exhilarating explorations—hidden mansions and haunted houses awaited.

But years would pass before I understood the redeeming power that Welty mentioned, how it is that the alphabet can help the lost find their way again. Welty’s words return to me whenever I read John 1: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”

Maybe it’s because I am the granddaughter of people who never learned the alphabet, a people for whom the written word meant their signature and nothing more, that this scripture means so much to me.

Don’t read Welty expecting Merton styled meditations. Welty’s strength is not in examining the divinity of God. It is matters of the flesh that she dissects with precision. Consider Clytie:

Yet the number of faces seemed to Clytie almost infinite. She knew now to look slowly and carefully at a face; she was convinced that it was impossible to see it all at once. The first thing she discovered about a face was always that she had never seen it before. When she began to look at people’s actual countenances there was no more familiarity in the world for her. The most profound, the most moving sight in the whole world must be a face.

Welty’s writing covers the entire range of human emotion. Enjoy old-fashioned belly laughter as you read about two sisters bickering in China Grove in Why I Live at the P.O., and wince as a man

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