Description:
America is Hard to Find is a compilation of Daniel Berrigan's writings while on the run from the FBI, letters from Danbury penitentiary, and a potpourri of poems and thoughts on the state of the country. The work as a whole reveals the spiritual journeys of a poet-priest who has endured the darkness and desolation of imprisonment and struggled through the meaning of his political acts of conscience.
A bleak paragraph describes the pall which hung over his spirit while behind bars:
Dying was a kind of banal continuum with living — crowded, messy, gray, noisy, a limbo by day or night. The senses are toned down, the body an
America is Hard to Find is a compilation of Daniel Berrigan's writings while on the run from the FBI, letters from Danbury penitentiary, and a potpourri of poems and thoughts on the state of the country. The work as a whole reveals the spiritual journeys of a poet-priest who has endured the darkness and desolation of imprisonment and struggled through the meaning of his political acts of conscience.
A bleak paragraph describes the pall which hung over his spirit while behind bars:
Dying was a kind of banal continuum with living — crowded, messy, gray, noisy, a limbo by day or night. The senses are toned down, the body and mind tend to lassitude, the sweet stimulus and variety of the world are a forbidden fruit, a remembrance of aching grief.
In an angry letter to the judge who sentenced the Catonsville Nine, he recounts the horrible conditions in the prisons, the forces that dehumanize the inmates and points to the public attitude that makes for this situation: "I mean that our prisons do not rehabilitate, because our society itself is destitute of a vision of man." Another letter went to J. Edgar Hoover. But the establishment remained mute.
One marvels at the resiliency of Berrigan's spirit under the stress of imprisonment. But the high-pitched excitement of his underground experience must have carried him through. Many of his writings on the run are included in this collection. Especially to be noted — his "Life at the Edge" piece, a work of essay art and theological daring; his prose poem review of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's biography; notes to the actors in The Trial of the Catonsville Nine and several letters to the Jesuits.
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Manufacturer: Doubleday
Release date: 25 May 1972
ISBN-10 : 0385003277 |
ISBN-13: 9780385003278
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