Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

["RHONDA MCDONNELL" <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com>]

Thanks for the musings, Marcus. Seems as though the Eliot reference might be a bit of a hard judgment on yourself, though, if I remember GERONTION correctly--it's one of my favorites.  The Yeats as well--that one seems to gain strength as time passes; so much for entropy in regard to art perhaps. 

 

Oddly enough, I find looking back at the '60s hopeful, although for me it's entirely through the lens of history, since I was only four when that decade ended.  If all that happened then didn't smash the country into a million pieces, then surely we can handle the present and future, even if we don't as a people always do so as gracefully as we might wish.

 

On Percy--Doesn't memory, the lack thereof or the hauntings by, play a prominent part in all but maybe LOVE IN THE RUINS? 

----- Original Message -----

From: marcus AT loyno.edu

To: Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion

Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2003 6:41 PM

Subject: Re: [percy-l] FWD: walker percy and dissociative fugue/amnesia

Welcome, Chuck,

Your profile makes you an almost perfect Percy character.

I seem to recall that Binx refers to movies which focus on a
(male) character who suffers from amnesia.  Don't have a
copy here so cannot check on my flawed memory.

Percy himself was, I guess you could say, subject to fits
and fugues, but that's a topic for another day.

Tonight I'm wondering about that day forty years ago, that
mad dream that they've been re-playing endlessly on the TV
for the past week.  I was dumping a slop bucket onto a
compost pile in Madison, Wisconsin, when our landlord came
out of his door and said that the President had been shot in
Dallas.  A few months later (partly to keep faith with some
of JFK's inaugural words), I went to the Middle East.  Six
years later I returned to the US aware that that part of the
world (which, despite our tendency towards poltical fugues
and national amnesia, gave us our ideas of history and
invented most of our gods) would have much more to do than
Vietnam with our ultimate destiny as a nation.  Yeats nailed
it in "Second Coming."  Or did he?  In the summer of 2002,
the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was filled with
gunmen and surrounded by tanks.  Nothing happened. The skies
didn't crack open.  Isn't it Hegel who compared history to a
butcher's table dripping with fresh blood?

Apologies to Chuck and the others for this muttering.
Thoughts of an old man's brain in a terrible season.

Marcus Smith


From: chaslow53 AT aol.com
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: Re: [percy-l] FWD: walker percy and dissociative
fugue/amnesia
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2003 19:45:01 EST

----- Original Message Follows -----
> Yes, Williston Bibb Barrett, to be precise.  In The Last
> Gentleman there is a  lengthy description--a dozen pages
> or so--of his mental condition before his  name is even
> mentioned.
>
> I only know this because The Last Gentleman is the latest
> novel I read.   Having said that, I note that I am a new
> (three or four days) member of this list.
>  I was sternly admonished by the anonymous listmaster to
> introduce myself to  the list.
>
> I'm afraid there is not much: I'm in the professional
> publishing business in  New York, I live in Brooklyn with
> a wife and a couple of children, I'm an  ordinary
> middle-aged (well, if I'm going to live to 108, I'm
> exactly at middle  age), middle class, fairly conservative
> Catholic whose Latin skills are somewhat  above the
> average of the general population and whose mechanical
> skills are  considerably below that of the general
> population.
>
> I came to WP through a co-worker who told me at a job
> interview that Walker  Percy was her favorite author and
> The Moviegoer was her favorite novel; she was  a fairly
> recent college graduate, an English major, and I could
> think of  nothing else to ask.  My curiosity was piqued
> and I read The Moviegoer, and then  The Second Coming.  I
> was hooked and read through them all, except Lancelot,
> which I picked up today.  Fortunately, the Jets and Giants
> are so frightful that  they will offer no plausible
> distraction for tomorrow's reading.
>
> Chuck Lowry
> Brooklyn, New York
> chaslow53 AT aol.com
>
> --
>
> An archive of all list discussion is available at
> http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/hypermail
>
> Visit the Walker Percy Project at
> http://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
>
--

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