The Duty of Delight in Times of Despair

Advice from the Queen of Resistance

I’ve been reading Dorothy Day’s diaries over the past few months, and I will be utterly bereft when I finish the massive tome (669 glorious pages). The diaries, under the title The Duty of Delight, are edited by Robert Ellsberg, former editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper and now head of Orbis Books, lefty Catholic publishing house of dreams.

(I resisted the urge to bring the book with me when we went to visit family in June, having learned from my youthful romantic insistence on lugging Proust to Paris with me and nearly dislocating my shoulder hefting it around. I sorely missed Dorothy’s steady companionship.)

The diaries cover so much ground, spanning from the 1930s, when the Catholic Worker was founded, all the way up to Dorothy’s death in 1980. The duty of delight is a phrase Dorothy borrowed from the philosopher John Ruskin, and it’s one that she mentioned repeatedly in her writing.

Dorothy was clear-eyed. She saw and paid far more attention than the average person did to the suffering that surrounded her. In her diaries, she details the ups and frustrating downs of the Catholic Worker community, but she also documents the many economic, political and social nightmares of the twentieth century. She was not one to bury her head in the sand. But she was not one to give into despair either.

Last week I found myself teetering on the edge of the abyss about some fresh new horrible thing happening in this country (I’M SORRY TO YELL, BUT THERE ARE SO MANY TO CHOOSE FROM), and I found myself feeling powerless. Truly doubtful of my ability to effect any change. Doubtful of my ability to even say anything helpful or hopeful in the midst of it. Ready to hang up my hat and be silent.

And then I remembered Dorothy, and I ended up giving myself an impromptu pep talk. Dorothy, too, could not believe how very beautiful and yet how very terrible the world was. We have a duty to notice, to pay attention to everything that needs remedying in this wild world. A duty, as Mother Jones put it, to pray for the dead and flight like hell for the living.

But we also have a duty to dwell on the overwhelming beauty of the world, to let its warmth soothe our sore hearts. Dorothy was exasperated with the world more than she was not: war, ruthless capitalism, poverty, racism, nuclear stockpiles, anything and everything that dehumanized people. But she was also so nourished by all that was good: waves on the sea and the laughter of her grandchildren, operas and symphonies and the wind that blew through her ailanthus tree.

When I found myself despairing last week, I gave myself an assignment: find something beautiful, let it nourish you, and carry on. A photo of the fat, glossy blueberries we had picked at a local farm did the trick. And soon I was ready to say, as St. Óscar Romero did, ¡Adelante!

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I’ve read a lot of Dorothy Day, and I love her writing, but there’s something different about a diary, about observations and crises and joys and heartbreaks captured in real time. Diaries are more honest. Wordsworth famously defined poetry as a spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion recollected in tranquility. In a diary, there is no such remove, no such tranquility.

As a diarist myself, I understand this. I have dozens and dozens of journals, and I fill a fresh notebook about every six months. I doubt anyone will ever read them—I’m not really that interesting of a person. Even still, I find it a struggle sometimes to be completely honest. “What if someone reads this petty thought someday?” I shiver in horror. And yet I keep writing, every morning, until the pages curl up under the weight of so much ink.

Diaries, of course, illuminate not just a life, but an era. I’m used to plumbing diaries from my academic days, skimming over the record of everyday life and seeking that gold mine every researcher hopes for: an individual response to a historical event (or in my case a literary one).

I can’t tell you what a joy it is to read Dorothy’s diaries in the exact opposite way. Yes, of course, it’s very interesting to read about her connections to people like Thomas Merton and Dan Berrigan, her fortitude in civil disobedience (and imprisonment), her constant struggle to secure a space for the Catholic Worker.

But what I treasure most are the little things that delight her. The radishes she planted every year on her daughter Tamar’s birthday. The roadside wildflowers whose name she endeavored to learn. The letters she wrote on the Staten Island ferry. The shells she collected on the beach. The fish her grandchildren caught in the river. The milkweed, the honeysuckle, and above all, the sweet clover. Dorothy’s words make me feel that I can imbibe a little bit of her delight, even though she died before I was born.

All of those precious things remind me to keep going, remind me not to neglect my own duty of delight. There’s so much work to be done. Thank God there is beauty to sustain us as we do it.

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A Few Hopeful Things:

—The star of jasmine is perfuming the air! The magnolia blossoms are as big as my head! The cream-colored hydrangeas across the street are both improbably puffy and the size of melons! Wonders abound.

—I wrote a little summer benediction for us.

—As I was thinking about diaries and memory-keeping for this post, I remembered the scrapbooks I made early in our marriage and flipped through them. Please enjoy laughing with me at these very young, very well-rested kids who have no idea what’s ahead of them!

And one final gentle admonition—when I made these scrapbooks, our life seemed almost too mundane to record. Who would care that on Saturdays we went to the farmer’s market and marveled at the giant fennel? Thirteen years later, I care a lot. Write things down. You’ll treasure them later. I promise.

With you in the delight that wards off despair,
Cameron