56 pages • 1 hour read
Dorothy DayThe Long Loneliness
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1952A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 26-28Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Love is the Measure”
Part 3, Chapter 26 Summary: “Peter’s Death”
Peter Maurin is having trouble forming complex thoughts. He is mostly silent for the last five years of his life: “He could longer discuss with others, give others in a brilliant overflow of talk his keen analysis of what was going on in the world; he could no longer make what he called his synthesis of cult, culture and cultivation” (275). God has taken his mind. Day thinks it is possible that this stems from a stroke Maurin might have had in his sleep. Fortunately, he does feel like he has finished his work. Eventually, Maurin passes away at night, coughing as he tries to sleep. He dies as people pray around him. There is an enormous funeral for him on Mott Street in Little Italy. Maurin wanted to make a better society and a new social order, one founded on an agrarian way of life.
Part 3, Chapter 27 Summary: “Chrystie Street”
After Maurin dies, the House of Cavalry, who owns the Mott Street house, says they are selling it to pay for a new cancer hospital wing. Though Day understands the importance of constructing a new hospital wing, she is sad to leave the Italian neighborhood that she loves, as many Italians are also anarchists who take care of their own.
Day prays about how and where they can find new housing. Readers of her paper help with donations and eventually they find a new home on Chrystie Street not too far from the old one. It is actually larger, with a shop, discussion rooms, and a library. The bills are still ever present, and the organization is behind on them. However, the Catholic Worker Movement will go on as long as people are in need of food and shelter.
Part 3, Chapter 28 Summary: “Postscript”
Day begins the chapter by describing how she feels like she was just sitting and talking with Peter Maurin. People come in wanting bread, they provide it, and that is the beginning. People go into the room and out of the room and the two friends are still there talking. Then it is suggested they all go live on a farm: “It was as casual as that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened” (285). She is in the right place at the right time and has the dedication to begin a movement and to sustain it.
Chapters 26-28 Analysis
Maurin loses his ability to form complex thoughts five years before he passes away. Fortunately, he feels like he has gotten his ideas across, including his concept of “cult, culture and cultivation,” or the development of a community that creates a culture and cultivates that culture, as well as the land and a love of God. Indeed, the farms he and Day, among others, create seem to have fostered that sensibility.
After Maurin dies, the Catholic Workers Movement has to move to a new house in New York City. This shows that life goes on, and that the only constant is change. At the very end of the text, Day focuses on how she met Maurin, saying that everything surrounding the movement seems to happen so quickly, so serendipitously. The heart of their movement is helping the poor, creating community, and fostering love. Based on Day’s accounting and recounting of her life, she asserts that she and Maurin were successful in creating, if not a sustainable movement, a lasting community.
