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Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life

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Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life

Paperback(Reprint)

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Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview

"A religious cliff-hanger—intimate, compelling, hard to put down."
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Eager to shake off the indelible brand of a Catholic upbringing, Patricia Hample seeks the "old world" of Catholicism. On her pilgrimage she meets others seekers—crotchety English agnostics, American Franciscan friars and nuns, and the seekers that fill every charter flight. Inevitably, too, she finds the "old world" right at home, in the very past she had tried to escape. But what she is looking for confronts her, finally, on a rereat at a monastery near the Lost Coast of northern California in the still, virgin moments of silent prayer....

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345384249
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/07/1993
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Patricia Hampl first stepped onto the literary scene with A Romantic Education, a Cold War memoir about her Czech heritage. Four of her books have been named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times Book Review. Hampl's work has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, The American Scholar, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays. In 1990 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In addition, she has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Bush Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts (twice, in poetry and prose), Ingram Merrill Foundation and Djerassi Foundation. Hampl teaches fall semesters in the English MFA program at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

What People are Saying About This

Margaret Maitland

With a jaunty spirit and an open mind, Patricia Hampl investigates what attracts people to sacred sites, from a group of jovial tourists on the trail of St. Francis at Assisi, to the heartbreaking throngs at Lourdes, where the devotion of families to their ailing members seems miracle enough.

From the B&N Reads Blog

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Editorial Reviews

In Catholic parochial school, writes Hampl ( A Romantic Education ), she learned the virtue of contemplation: ``Pondering was the highest vocation. . . . Pondering was a special kind of thinking. It was not done in the mind, that chilly place, but in the heart, where the real mystery of intelligence--intuition rather than thought--lay catlike and feminine, ready to pounce.'' Accordingly, as she seeks the meaning of faith--by visiting several Catholic pilgrimage sites in Europe and a California-based Cistercian women's monastery, and by musing over her religious upbringing in Minnesota--she exercises her observational skills with a fury. She describes the wildflowers of Umbria and the quirks and passions of English agnostic travel companions; she relates how, in Assisi, touring Franciscans ``spoke of Francis and Clare as of people who had just left the room for a moment''; in Lourdes, she is overwhelmed by a crowd of supplicants, many of them in wheelchairs; and in the California monastery, she probes the meaning of silence. But for all its prettiness and earnestness, Hampl's prose is finally prolix and enervating. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

``People like me, fused by fascination to their past, find themselves taking planes to distant places,'' observes Hampl, whose A Romantic Education ( LJ 2/1/81) reported on growing up Czech in America. To sort out her feelings about the Catholicism she rejected as a young woman, Hampl heads for Europe--the past of dusky cathedrals and centuries-old monasteries where her religion was forged. But along the road to Assisi, at the Poor Clare monastery on the Borgo San Pietro, and at Lourdes, she encounters not religious exaltation but vapid tourists and an American nun who is singularly unwilling to share her feelings. Only at a retreat in Mendicino, California, where religion is being remade, does she find true spirituality, learning to accept rather than to impose. Poet Hampl's prose is beautifully incisive, delivering her cascading reflections and sardonic asides on some loutish fellow pilgrims with equal vigor. Unfortunately, the reflections don't quite cohere--it's hard to follow the development of her thought--but her beautiful scattering of ideas is still well worth reading.-- Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''

Library Journal