Seeing the light, then losing sight of it

Greatly enjoyed Jim Shepard's essay on Flannery O'Connor on the Atlantic website...Shepard names something that has always bugged me about the idea of epiphanies in literature - that they don't last. He writes:

Writers talk a lot about epiphanies—what O'Connor, in her Catholic tradition, called "grace"—in short stories. But I think we're tyrannized by a misunderstanding of Joyce's notion of the epiphany. That stories should toodle on their little track toward a moment where the characters understand something they didn't understand before—and, at that moment, they're transformed into better people.

[...]

This kind of conversion notion is based on a very comforting idea—that if only we had sufficient information, we wouldn't act badly. And that's one of the great things about what The Misfit tells the Grandmother in the line I like so much. He's not saying that a near-death experience would have turned her into a good woman. He's saying it would take somebody threatening to shoot her every minute of her life.

In other words, these conversion experiences don't stick—or they don't stick for very long. Human beings have to be re-educated over and over and over again as we swim upstream against our own irrationalities.

I have to admit I've had more earth-shattering epiphanies than I can actually recall...too many moments in which everything seems to make sense, only to get swallowed in the fog of living again a few hours or - if I'm lucky - days later. I've tried to write them down, draw them when they are of that nature, but even then, I too often end up looking back at my notes and wondering what on earth I was seeing in that state of enlightenment.