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percy-l - Re: [percy-l] "Literary Louisiana" - New York Times feature article (April 10, 2015)

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

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  • From: "janetcantor37 AT yahoo.com" <janetcantor37 AT yahoo.com>
  • To: "wppdirector AT gmail.com" <wppdirector AT gmail.com>, "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] "Literary Louisiana" - New York Times feature article (April 10, 2015)
  • Date: Sun, 12 Apr 2015 13:16:39 +0000 (UTC)

It took me a while to get to this, but thank you immensely for this excellent article.

Look at this paragraph in particular:

My final stop was also my starting place: Baton Rouge where Huey Long built the nation’s tallest state capitol building, a 34-story Deco-Moderne skyscraper. Three years later when he was a United States senator, he’d be assassinated outside his offices. Or, as Robert Penn Warren put it in “All the King’s Men”: “We came into the great lobby, under the dome, where there was a blaze of light over the statues which stood in statesmanlike dignity on pedestals to mark the quarters of the place. … I saw the two little spurts of pale-orange flame from the muzzle of the weapon.”

That reminded me of those light reflections that appeared all over Love in the Ruins which I kept asking about and Jay Tolson answered about them this way:

The light reflections?  Hard to determine authorial intent, but reflected light suggests soul to me.  That it is reflected means that the soul is dependent on the source of that light.  Whether Percy intended it or not, was aware of it or not, the fact is that these reflected lights are everywhere, speaking to us at a subliminal level, suggests that Percy was showing that we are not autonomous creatures but dependent on the source of our being.

Janet Cantor








Literary Louisiana New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/travel/12Cover-Literary-Louisiana.html







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