by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Charles D'Ambrosio: “The Conflicted Mind in Motion”

New Year’s resolution: Read Charles D'Ambrosio.

Put that way, it sounds like a chore and not an anticipated pleasure long deferred.  But an anticipated pleasure long deferred (and doesn’t it sound straight out of the catechism, put that way) is what it is.  Again and again people I trust (Brennan O'Donnell, Chris Richards, Fred Bahnson) have sung the song of D'Ambrosio; and over the weekend his new book of essays got an extraordinarily generous review from the current keeper of the keys to the essay, Phillip Lopate.

Lopate’s review – really a compact essay in its own right – is focused on D'Ambrosio’s effects and how he gets them:

“A good essay seemed to question itself in a way that a novel or short story did not,” he explains. “It was a forum for self-doubt, for an attempt whose outcome wasn’t assured.” Happily admitting, “I’ve depended on my ignorance quite a bit” and “rarely researched” these efforts, D’Ambrosio has tried to use his “little store of half-knowledge” to take back some of the space “we’ve ceded … to the expert.” His aim, he states, is to “capture the conflicted mind in motion.” Confessing that he “worked on each of these pieces a stupidly long time,” he claims that “the goal of those revisions was to get the thing to read like a rough draft.”

On Oregon Public Radio a few weeks ago – thanks to Fred Bahnson for sending it – D'Ambrosio explained how his insistent skepticism coexists with a “home-brewed understanding” of the Catholic faith he grew up with.  The heart of it is this: 

… to recognize other people as human beings. It seems so simple and it’s so difficult … I mean, the most despised, our enemies: they remain human beings.  It’s a challenge. It’s not about what it provides me; it’s about what it asks of me, and it asks difficult things. 

Put that way, it reads like a home-brewed understanding of Catholic art, a rough draft of the complicated ideas on the subject that some of us have been passing back and forth the past couple of years.  

Flannery O'Connor liked to quote Conrad on the novelist’s duty to render “the highest possible justice to the visible universe.”  Well, from this point I’ll probably quote Charles D'Ambrosio on the essayist’s duty to render the highest possible justice to the human being – by recognizing other people as human beings.   

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