And yet it is true now that for a young man, being a radical may just reflect the fad. It was different in the whole fifties. Young Fruc was alone. The young writers in the U.P. were only preoccupied with mouthing Prufrock, with dilettantism, or with Freud, and self-sought neurosis. My dear friend Fr. John Delaney was a hero all over campus and classrooms. Young Fructuoso was lonely and alone writing about the floor sweeper, about catholic writing. He was telling himself, “Just forget everything. Clear your mind of anything. Just sharpen it and then begin yourself with anything you see and know, you feel and grieve. Then say it as if it is an object under a cloudless sky on a summer noon, clear without shadow and multifold dimensional in its entirety. Nobody knows what you know and nobody can say thus for you. You are not Lazarus rebearable. Your life is once. Make it yours now.” But in Fruc, the radical life is grounded both to the uncertainness of the moral good that is freed from the concept of God and to his basic contradictory search for the moral good, good equally for everybody. It is an open moral philosophy. Its action as he puts it in “On Campus Writing” is not conservative and yet conserving: that is, it is a process of continuous construction, never totally finished to be conserved as a mummy and dogma and yet at any time is tentatively structured upon the moral general good. One must be an avid skeptic in the cognition of the good or he is in danger of proclaiming his own godhood. And yet he must also hold on to a tentatively moral philosophy. Otherwise, he paves the formless path of anarchy which is a complete breakdown of systems, a collapse of moral philosophy. He does not say that his is the good, and the other’s not, or vice-versa. He acts, as though there likely is, to find the good for both of them.
Letter to Ethel, September 7, 1971