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

[Henry Mills <wppdirector AT gmail.com>]

Thanks for sending these Percy items through the list, Janet.  For those interested, the article link is:

https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/394971/carry-fire

Best regards,
Henry Mills

On 12/29/14 12:04 AM, janetcantor37--- via Percy-L wrote:

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 I am highlighting excerpts, but if you want to read the whole thing, click on the title.

To Carry the Fire

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          

DECEMBER 17, 2014 11:00 PM

To Carry the Fire

By Ian Tuttle

....

The End is always nigh, but it seems to be more nigh than usual of late....

“Nothing is easier,” wrote Walker Percy in his essay “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World,” “than to set up as a two-bit hippie Cassandra crying havoc in bad verse.....

In the essay on apocalyptic fiction mentioned above, Walker Percy (who, one might note, wrote at least one such tale, Love in the Ruins, subtitle: “The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World”) concludes: “Perhaps it is only through the conjuring up of catastrophe, the destruction of all Exxon signs, and the sprouting of vines in the church pews, that the novelist can make vicarious use of catastrophe in order that he and his reader may come to themselves.”....

By way of comparison, consider not our prophets “in reverse” (as Percy calls apocalyptic authors), but a prophet of the more common type...

..... the apocalyptic novel as envisioned by Percy, “‘religious’ in its root sense as signifying a radical bond, as the writer sees it, which connects man with reality — or the failure of such a bond — and so confers meaning to his life — or the absence of meaning.” The apocalyptic novel, in its highest form, is God-haunted.