THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS MEANING PATCH

Eliot and others thought that was unfortunate-his famous line is “these fragments I have shored against my ruins.” I don’t think of fragments in that way. In my opinion, all our traditions are in fragments. I defend it as a way to break totalities, to fragment all totality systems and open them to infinity, which has become a major category for my work. And of course it eventually became very popular with the literary modernists and even more with the postmodern writers who typically write in fragmentary ways. It was started as a major category by the German Romantics in the late eighteenth century. Why fragments, and what is the existential situation of our time that you’re referring to?ĭAVID TRACY: “Fragments” is a category I developed some years ago. To quote a line from Yeats, “Speech after long silence it is right.” Volume One is titled Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time. Both are collections of essays, some of them written as recently as last year. WOODWARD: David, the University of Chicago Press is about to publish two books by you, the first, they say, in twenty-five years. As for reading, he routinely does that until four in the morning.

THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS MEANING PATCH

Like the late John Updike, Tracy uses a different desk or patch of dining-room table for each lecture, essay, book, or other project he is working on. The rooms beyond are wide and warm, the furniture mostly of the comfortably stuffed sort that welcomes a reader-or a dozer. Upon entering his roomy apartment in Hyde Park, which David shares with his brother, Arthur, the first thing that strikes a visitor’s eye is a paint-flecked, somewhat injured fourteenth-century wooden French Madonna with Child adorning the vestibule table. It seemed a good time, then, to call on Tracy and catch up on his thinking, and on the progress of what he calls “the big book.” Earlier this year he lectured at universities in Vienna and Zagreb-another sign that his health, never terribly robust, has returned. This fall the University of Chicago Press will publish two volumes of essays by Tracy, the first new books of his to appear in twenty-five years. In 1982 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the few Catholic priests to be so honored. In addition to his doctorate in sacred theology from the Gregorian University in Rome, he has fourteen honorary degrees and has served on the editorial boards of eight scholarly publications. Now eighty years old and Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago, where he taught for thirty-eight years, Tracy is the author of four books and some two hundred essays.

Tracy is widely regarded as one of the most creative and influential theologians of the past half-century. He has lectured at fifty-five colleges and universities in the United States and around the world, including the University of Edinburgh, where he delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures in 2000. Tracy, a priest of the Diocese of Bridgeport, Connecticut, is an internationally known and esteemed scholar and teacher.

The tracey fragments meaning