Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say), by Frederick Buechner
If this is not Frederick Buechner's valedictory volume it surely could be, given the pathos of his "Afterword": "If somebody a while back had offered me a thousand more years, I would have leapt at it, but at this point I would be inclined to beg off on the grounds that . . . the eventual end to life seems preferable to the idea of an endlessly redundant extension of it." He does, of course, regret not being around "to see what becomes of my grandchildren," but his comment then moves to the tragic side: "They say we are never happier than our unhappiest child, and if that is expanded to include the next generation down, the result is unthinkable."
Buechner's sentiments are not gloomy, but they are clearly chastened--a poignant attempt at transparent moral realism by a religious man now "pushing seventy-five." And there is "sadness in thinking how much more I might have done with my life than just writing . . . If I make it as far as St. Peter's gate, the most I will be able to plead is my thirty-two books, and if that is not enough, I am lost."
There is still autobiographical energy behind this book: "Over the last fifty years or so I have both directly in my various memoirs and indirectly in my novels tried to deal with as best I could--to understand as fully, to lay to rest as finally--the dark shadow that my father's suicide continues to cast over my days even now that more than sixty-five years have passed since it occurred in my childhood," Buechner states. Though his intention in this book was "to shift my gaze from the inward to outward, to the shadowy side of lives other than mine," it is clear that he continues to pursue the meaning behind the early trauma that darkened his life.
