Falling in Love with O'Neill

Abstract

I have always been a creature of linear time. My struggle has been not so much with the past as with the future. I’ve lived in anticipation of whatever comes next, lining up the tasks of life, whether of the day, week, or year, then checking them off one by one. “When I finish this paper, this class, this degree (fill in the blank), I will . . .” To live each moment in the moment, to embrace what a favorite theologian of mine calls the eighth sacrament, presence—that has been my challenge. So when I sat in a graduate American Drama class one evening in September 1973 (September 17, to be precise), listening to the professor unpacking the complexities of O’Neill’s use of time in Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I was transfixed. He explained how all of the characters were trapped in time, longing for a moment in the past when they had experienced the confluence of their values and desires: Mary’s wedding day, James’ compliment by actor Edmund Booth on his performance of Othello, Edmund’s ideal moments of oneness with the sea, Jamie’s innocence prior to learning of his mother’s addiction. As year followed year and these ideal moments receded ever further into the past, they all experienced a searing sense of guilt they didn’t understand; thus they lashed out at one another in cycles of accusation and recrimination, trying unwittingly to locate the cause of their guilt in one another. While the play is replete with references to linear time, the professor said, indeed is structured by it, it is also shaped by two other modalities of time, what Mircea Eliade calls cyclic and mythic time, concepts that were new to me. Something about that discussion resonated deeply with me. No matter that the Tyrones were New England Irish Catholics (lapsed or not) and I was by birth a Midwestern German Lutheran: this play was about me. It probably didn’t hurt that the professor was Fr. Tom Porter, a Jesuit and himself Irish Catholic, or that he was proving to be the best teacher I had ever encountered. It was the first semester of my doctoral studies at the