Memento Mori

This week, we were reading Flannery O'Connor's short stories for class. The Times ran a lovely review of Brad Gooch's biography of O'Connor today. Her weirdness was like a peacock's feather left behind unexpectedly, says the article, and Gooch made it lose its lustre by filling that biography with banal details of what she ate, and the things she did. I processed Gooch's files at Joy Harris (!). I also loved this paragraph:

The first, perhaps, and last, perhaps, kiss she received from a man was in 1954. The man was Erik Langkjaer, a young and handsome college textbook salesman who described the event thusly: “As our lips touched, I had a feeling that her mouth lacked resilience, as if she had no muscle tension in her mouth, a result being that my own lips touched her teeth rather than lips, and this gave me an unhappy feeling of a sort of memento mori, and so the kissing stopped. . . . I had a feeling of kissing a skeleton, and in that sense it was a shocking experience.”