Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life
Language: English
Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1992
- Signed
- Hardcover
- Used

Seller: Ally Press Center, St. Paul, MN, U.S.A.Ally Press Center
AbeBooks seller since November 8, 1997
Condition: Used - Very good
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Quantity: 1 available
Add to basketItem description from seller
6 X 9 inches. 241 pages. Green cloth hardcover with gilt type on spine. Stated 2nd printing. Autographed by author Patricia Hampl on the half title page.
Seller Inventory # 2303115ShelveE-Off
- Title
- Virgin Time: In Search of the Contemplative Life
- Author
- Hampl, Patricia
- Publisher
- Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- Publication year
- 1992
- Condition
- Very Good
- Dust jacket
- Very Good
- Signed
- Signed by Author(s)
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Language
- English
- ISBN 10
- 0374284407
- ISBN 13
- 9780374284404
- Edition
- 2nd Edition
- Seller catalogs
- Biography
"Synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Reviews
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Hampl, a poet, professor (English/Univ. of Minnesota), and MacArthur Fellow, peers into her soul and finds the Church. A rambling, radiant travelogue-cum-memoir, a sequel of sorts to the author's acclaimed autobiography, A Romantic Education (1981). Raised by devout Catholic parents, schooled by nuns, Hampl nevertheless finds that ``most of the time I'm so removed from belief I confuse it with having an opinion.'' To resolve this dilemma, she heads to Europe to ``see the old world of Catholicism.'' Most of her time is spent in Assisi, scrambling up holy mountains, kneeling in crypts, sifting her past, recording the chatter of priests, nuns, and other seekers. Just about all of it is passed on to us: encounters with fellow travelers whose passions and prattle fill up too much of the text; superb memories of a Catholic childhood drenched in dogma, instructed by nuns who radiated ``a bracing coolness''; gems of theological insight (``it was integral to the fundamental inspiration of Christianity that Jesus was poor. He was nothing and nobody, and therefore he could be a metaphor from minute one. He was the Word made flesh''); too many passages that sound like warmed-over Annie Dillard (on an airplane, ``wrinkles of terror run over the soles of my feet. My toes curl towards earth''). Over all hovers the kindly presence of St. Francis; beneath all runs the urgency of Hampl's quest, driven by the realization that ``God was not at stake....prayer was the real question.'' A tentative answer comes, oddly, not in Assisi but in a tacked-on visit to a Cistercian monastery in California. Much like a High Mass: rich, beautiful, boring, elevating. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
"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"
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Ally Press Center
St. Paul, MN, U.S.A.
AbeBooks seller since November 8, 1997
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Specializing in the area of Midwest and Minnesota history Jungian psychology, men's work, poetry, mythology and everything by and about the poet Robert Bly.
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