Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene: Day 8
Part I, Chapter VI-VII (p. 79-87)
“He teaches that if you doubt whether you are dealing with one monster or two, you must strike an average and baptize one head absolutely and the other conditionally.”
I must confess: this (quite reasonable) idea of Father Heribert Jone makes me want to read his book.
“How happy you must be with your complete belief. There’s only one thing you will ever lack—the dignity of despair.”
One of the fiercest things Father Quixote has said so far. Really, one of the fiercest things one can read in any fiction.
“Father Quixote had always been inquisitive in small ways. His greatest temptation in the confessional box was to ask unnecessary and even irrelevant questions.”
The confession box feels like a good metaphor for fiction: Possibly most of the confessions are cliches, but there is bound to be one of those extraordinary stories waiting to be told.
Join us on December 3 for a virtual discussion of Monsignor Quixote with Yiyun Li.
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Not to dispel the humour and satire entailed in baptizing a breech birth, at a time when birth was a fraught experience for both mother and child, the attendance of a priest in case an emergency baptism or last rights were needed was common. Still, the mental image of the priest crowding in to what would be a chaotic, horrific scene to spread a bit of holy water on to the emerging nether regions of a possibly doomed child is worthy of a chapter all by itself.
‘There are degrees of evil, Sancho – and of good. We can try to discriminate between the living, but with the dead we can’t discriminate. They all have the same need of our prayer.’
The dead become anonymous to MQ.