Virgin Time

...In fact, he was not only excep- tionally bright and thoughtful, he was ex- ceedingly learned--all somewhat concealed by an artfully modest, self-ef- facing, even self-mocking manner, and very important, by his preference for lis- tening rather than lecturing or declaiming or pontificating, those habits of talkative folk...

...Her visits also prompt her to ponder her Catholic past--or perhaps it is the other way round, so calculated is her mnemonic process...

...Was it still breathing...

...and sensing that she was receiving a "contemplative" education in which "Cath- olicism itself came to us as aura, not as dog- ma," and "sainthood was a matter of who kept the best notes...

...Hampl has been justly celebrated forA Romantic Education, her 1981 memoir of two visits to Communist-era Prague, spurred by the mystical sense of Central Europe that she imbibed while growing up in St...

...Where are we going?--and who was determined to engage his readers in a sim- ilar line of inquiry through every writer's strategy known to him...

...More than see--had to touch it...

...What are we...

...But Patricia Hampl is emphatically not some apologist, trying to explain and defend the content of religious faith...

...Paul...

...He was an ironist, a marvelously funny satirist, but also an intensely seri- ous person who never stopped asking the biggest questions--as in the Gauguin trip- tych: Where do we come from...

...The narrative is enriched by a treas- ure of marvelously instructive and entertaining letters between Percy and his lifelong friend and fellow writer, Shelby Foote--indeed, their correspondence ought to be separately published...

...So she set out, grants in hand, on pilgrimage to Assisi and Lourdes and a California monastery, all the while recalling her Catholic childhood...

...And she wondered: just what is prayer all about...

...She recalls watching Kennedy's inauguration with nuns thrilled by Jackie's clothes...

...After all, she writes, "Nobody says, when asked, 'I'm Catholic.' It's always, 'I was brought up Catholic.'" It is a tribute to her powers of observation and her exact, evocative prose that such a myopic baby-boomer outlook doesn't mar the book more than it does...

...he would remind a visitor that he had been a premed student, then learned to be a doctor--hence many missed opportunities to study literature and history...

...He was, indeed, a pil- grim-and one sent here to grace us, to help us as we struggle to find ourselves amidst the moral and spiritual ruins of this fast-ending millennium...

...Paul Elie L ibrarians and others who are called to read the fine print will find that the Library of Congress has classified this book as Apologetics...

...par excellence, sliding from blow-by-blow journal transcriptions to cultural criticism to precious memoir...

...It was a romantic ed- ucation, too, rich in symbol and metaphor 6 November 1992:27...

...A poet, she takes a more personal approach...

...I read the book slowly, savoring the de- tails, immersing myself, yet again, in the story of a person I've much respected, Commonweal deeply admired for over thirty years...

...Once a convent-school ingenue, now a MacArthur fellow, she "came to the conviction that I had to see the old world of Catholicism...

...Throughout this book Tolson shows great respect and affection for his sub- ject, while reserving the right to stand back, offer a demur here, a disagreement there--a fine tone...

...I hated to come to the end, even as I still can't quite believe that the wonderfully knowing and funny man--his ideas always so provocative, suggestive, edifying, whom Jay Tolson evokes so sensitively and fully--won't, soon, be sending read- ers yet another story, or disarmingly wry A TOURIST OF FAITH VIRGIN TIME In Search of the Contemplative Life Patricia Hampi Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $20, 242 pp...

...There she joins some contemplative nuns in saying the Divine Office, which leads her to conclude that "I wasn't fallen away anymore: now, magically, the church had fallen away," en- abling her to revisit the ancient texts as sub- lime poetry...

...Paul...

...And just as she de- picted Prague as a repository of the past, a patch of virgin time walled off from the progressive West, so she writes as though the Catholic clock stopped fight around the time she herself "left the church (lavish the- atrical phrase of my university days) in a blaze of contempt...

...But then, we should expect no less from an admirer of Percy's, a careful, appreciative read- er of his, hence a student of someone who, early on, took the measure of pretentious twentieth-century academic thinking and scorned it mightily, heartily...

...Tolson as a chroni- cler is wonderfully uninterested in the dreary psychological and sociological banalities that inform so much bio-graphical writing these days...

...Surely, the good Lord now holds him close--even as for many of us left behind, life is far loneli- er, far less interesting...

...Here, as there, she is a belletrist and engaging essay...

...Yet, there he was, for decades, writing about complex philo- sophical questions both as essayist and as novelist...

...Her "search for the contemplative life" is not about the sub- stance of faith but about her approach to it--an approach in which she stops short not only of faith but of the hard questions her encounter with faith might have pressed upon her...

...feeling superior to Protestant girls as she and her schoolmates "powered around our ordinary lives in the Cadillac language of Catholic spirituali- ty...

...Her pilgrimage begins not on an airplane (as the book does, cloyingly) but with her visit to a "cinder-block monastery" near the freeway in St...

...Whereas a number of earlier books on Percy have been primarily intellectual biographies, this one offers a year-by-year account of an unfolding life--with stops now and then, for literary analysis, authorial com- ment...

...Making its low murmur over the votive flames in the dark...