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

["Karl M. Terrell" <kterrell AT stokeswagner.com>]

Quote-accuracy aside, this an interesting idea from both Percy and
O¹Connor, and reminds me of an observation I once heard or read, somewhere
‹ my spin of which is: One sign of a capable mind, or of at least a
careful mind, is the ability to distinguish the things you don¹t know.
Far too many fail to understand this, and get themselves in all kinds of
trouble.  

Percy and O¹Connor, though, speak to a higher ambition ‹ the undertaking
of a search to identify the things we know, but as to which ‹ while stuck
in our everydayness ‹ we didn¹t realize we knew, or were perhaps unable to
know.

Karl

On 5/27/15, 4:41 PM, "Skip Collins" <skip.collins AT gmail.com> wrote:

>> "Fiction doesn¹t tell us something we don¹t know, it tells us
>> something we know but don¹t know that we know."
>
>As with many pithy quotes found on the internet, I believe that this
>is a paraphrase. I suspect the original source is what Percy said in
>his interview with Zoltan Abadi-Nagy, which has been edited to be more
>quotable.
>
>Another famous quote that I came across, attributed to Flannery
>O'Connor, seems like it might have influenced Percy's thinking:
>"I write to discover what I know."
>
>This is supposedly from The Habit of Being, a collection of O'Connor's
>letters that Percy must have read. But when I went on Amazon to find
>the quote, it did not show up in the search. It too appears to be a
>cleaned up version of a less quotable passage from a letter she wrote
>in 1948:
>"I don't have my novel outlined and I have to write to discover what I
>am doing. Like the old lady, I don't know so well what I think until I
>see what I say; then I have to say it over again."
>
>This is more about her process of writing than some general theory of
>coming to discover what she already knows through writing.
>
>I would love to be proven wrong about both the Percy and O'Connor quotes.
>
>-- 
>skip
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