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The Duty Of Delight: The Diaries Of Dorothy Day (2008)

by Dorothy Day(Favorite Author)

4.26 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0874620236 (ISBN13: 9780874620238)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Marquette University Press

review 1: Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker, kept sporadic diaries from 1934 until her death in 1980. Open to the public only in 2005, the personal notes have been edited and annotated by her follower Robert Ellsberg. They are must reading for any Catholic, especially one like me, a writer like her, who lived through the tumultuous events of the 1960s. Since becoming a Catholic in 2008, I have found Dorothy Day a special inspiration, as an "extraordinary ordinary" Catholic, who lived and loved and drank (while young) and served drunks (while aging), who was embroiled in all the issues of her day from nuclear disarmament to the liturgical changes brought about by Vatican II, who was devout and conservative but never judgmental (like Pope Francis perhaps). She lived it all s... moreo faithfully and yet so honestly here in her diaries, deeply aware of her own sinfulness and repetitious failures. For several months, I read a few entries per day from this 700-page volume as part of my morning devotional reading. Finally, I decided to finish the book all at a crack, as I thought she might outlive me. (I might die before finishing the book.) And so I've done so. (Finished the book, that is.) The last 20 years of her life were particularly moving to me, as she lived through many of the events as an older adult that I witnessed as a young adult: the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and MLK; the United Farmworker strikes of the early 1970s; the anti-nuclear protests at the Seabrook nuclear power plant just north of where I live; the death of Pope Paul VI and the elections of the two John Pauls in 1978; and so on. This gave me a distinct sense of living contemporaneously with a saint, yet one who took it all so much more deeply and seriously than I did. But most moving of all was to read the last decade and watch her aging and losing her memory and accepting her frailty. "Waking up confused again," she writes. "Losing my mind. Wake up not knowing what day it is until Frank brings in mail and NY Times."Yet to the end of life Dorothy kept a diary and attended mass or had the Eucharist brought to her in her room at Mary house, the CW House of Hospitality where she died. (She lived her last 47 years in what we would call halfway houses, which she had founded.) At the very end, she was self-aware, as a woman and a writer, who could regret the failing of her most precious talent while insisting on "the duty of delight": "Wake up remembering that we go to press today with our minuscule 8-page paper (compared to the NY Times) and I think my usual wandering thoughts of what I could have written about myself, a woman born in 1897, a woman of long life, of varied experiences."
review 2: It took me several months to finish this collection of entires from Dorothy Day's diaries, but it was worth it, reading a few pages every now and then.Dorothy Day is honest, revealing her joys and sorrows, lamenting her failures of impatience and judgment. But her delight in the ordinary - from the opera on the radio to a book by Dostoevsky to the pigeons on the house across the street.You get a glimpse of her love for the poor and her struggle with enduring some of them.There are references to her public life as well as to the events of the day.It's a book to be meditated over. less

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