The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

Interpretation: In the years after the onset of lupus, Flannery
O’Connor noticed a peculiar phenomenon: In her interactions with
friends, visitors, and correspondents, she often found herself playing
the role of the adviser, giving people guidance on how to live, where to
put their energies, how to remain calm amid difficulties and have a
sense of purpose. All the while, she was the one who was dying and
dealing with severe physical restrictions.

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She sensed that increasing numbers of people in this world had lost
their way. They could not wholeheartedly commit themselves to their
work or to relationships. They were always dabbling in this or that,
searching for new pleasures and distractions but feeling rather empty
inside. They tended to fall apart in the face of adversity or loneliness,
and they turned to her as someone solid who would be able to tell them
the truth about themselves and give them some direction.
As she saw it, the difference between her and these other people was
simple: She had spent year after year looking death squarely in the eye
without flinching. She did not indulge in vague hopes for the future,
put her trust in medicine, or drown her sorrows in alcohol or
addiction. She accepted the early death sentence imposed on her, using
it for her own ends.
For Flannery, her proximity to death was a call to stir herself to
action, to feel a sense of urgency, to deepen her religious faith and
spark her sense of wonder at all mysteries and uncertainties of life. She
used the closeness of death to teach her what really matters and to help
her steer clear of the petty squabbles and concerns that plagued others.
She used it to anchor herself in the present, to make her appreciate
every moment and every encounter.
Knowing that that her illness had a purpose to it, there was no need
to feel self-pity. And by confronting and dealing with it straight on, she
could toughen herself up, manage the pain that racked her body, and
keep writing. By the time she had received yet another bullet, the
separation with Erik, she could regain her balance after several
months, without turning bitter or more reclusive.
What this meant was that she was thoroughly at home with the
ultimate reality represented by death. In contrast, so many other
people, including those she knew, suffered from a reality deficit,
avoiding the thought of their mortality and the other unpleasant
aspects of life.
Focusing so deeply on her mortality had one other important
advantage—it deepened her empathy and sense of connection to
people. She had a peculiar relationship to death in general: It did not
represent a fate reserved for her alone but rather was intimately tied to
her father. Their sufferings and deaths were intertwined. She saw her
own nearness to death as a call to take this further, to see that all of us
are connected through our common mortality and made equal by it. It

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is the fate we all share and should draw us closer for that reason. It
should shake us out of any sense of feeling superior or separated.
Flannery’s increased empathy and feeling of unity with others, as
evidenced by her strong desire to communicate with all types of
people, caused her to eventually let go of one of her greatest
limitations: the racist sentiments toward African Americans she had
internalized from her mother and many others in the South. She saw
this clearly in herself and struggled against it, particularly in her work.
By the early 1960s she came to embrace the civil rights movement led
by Martin Luther King Jr. And in her later stories she began to express
a vision of all the races in America converging one day as equals,
moving past this dark stain on our country’s past.
For over thirteen years, Flannery O’Connor stared down the barrel
of the gun pointed at her, refusing to look away. Certainly her religious
faith helped her maintain her spirit, but as Flannery herself knew, so
many people who are religious are just as full of illusions and evasions
when it comes to their own mortality, and just as capable of
complacency and pettiness as anyone else. It was her particular choice
to use her fatal disease as the means for living the most intense and
fulfilling life possible.