Duty of Delight
Dorothy Day kept a diary for most of her adult life, and she asked that her private papers remain sealed for twenty-five years after her death. She died in November 1980; the seal lifted in 2005, and this volume — assembled and annotated by Robert Ellsberg, who had served as managing editor of *The Catholic Worker* under Day — is what came out. It covers roughly 1934 to 1980, from the first years of the Catholic Worker movement to entries written days before her death. The earliest journals, from her bohemian years in Greenwich Village and her conversion, do not survive; she destroyed them. What remains is the record of the woman already committed: houses of hospitality, breadlines, farms, picket lines, jail cells, and forty-six years of trying to live with the poor rather than merely on their behalf.
The title comes from a phrase of John Ruskin's that Day copied out and returned to for decades. She understood delight not as a mood that arrives but as an obligation — a discipline practiced against bitterness, exhaustion, and the particular corrosion of living in permanent community with difficult people. The diaries make that discipline visible in a way her published writing does not. Entries alternate between the sublime and the trivial without transition: the price of beans, the weather, a complaint about noise in the house, a line from Teresa of Ávila or Thérèse of Lisieux, the psalms of the day, grief over a death, irritation at a fellow worker, gratitude for her daughter Tamar and the grandchildren. Dostoevsky's warning that love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams runs underneath the whole book, and here one can watch it being tested daily. There is no argument being constructed. There is a life being kept honest on paper, and the theology emerges from the accumulation — sanctity as something worked out in laundry, arrests, and the refusal to despair of people.
The book has mattered because it resists the flattening that follows canonization talk. Day's cause was opened in 2000, and these pages show a woman who was frequently annoyed, frequently lonely, and never certain she was doing it right. For readers formed on spiritual writing that stays at altitude, the diaries are a corrective: the ordinary is where it happens, or it does not happen.
Who should read this: anyone doing sustained work among the poor who needs proof that weariness and holiness coexist, and anyone drawn to Day who wants her unedited rather than her summarized. Not for readers looking for a systematic account of Catholic social teaching, and not for those who want a diary with narrative shape — this one repeats, digresses, and stops mid-thought, because life did.