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  • From: "janetcantor37 AT yahoo.com" <honeyjbc AT gmail.com>
  • To: percy lists <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [percy-l] Fw: Love in the Ruins—DiscussionQuestions for “July 1” Chapters 1-5
  • Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2026 18:33:55 +0000 (UTC)

Wade, I also mentioned how close this novel was to Percy's biography. 


Was it George Orwell who warned that if society is destroyed, it will be in the name of science?

----- Forwarded Message -----
From: Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net>
To: "percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Sent: Friday, June 12, 2026, 02:24:30 PM EDT
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Love in the Ruins—DiscussionQuestions for “July 1” Chapters 1-5

There is a rage in today's billionaires at being incarnate.  At the upper
echelons, they spend extraordinary sums on "blood bags" to transfuse factors
in the blood of young people into themselves (parabiosis) and fund research
into various genetic hacks ilke senolytics (which does actually provide
valuable medicine).  They also fantasize about uploading their consciousness
into perfect robot bodies (a mathematical impossibility, by the way).

Tom is at the other end with the "lapsometer" looking for other fallen souls
("Help!  I've fallen and I can't get up!", as that old ad for Emergency Alert
put it that generations of New Orleanians mocked).  His dreams are haunted by
the remnant leftovers of imperial failure (Verdun and Nazis).

I've always thought _Love in the Ruins_ was the novel that tracked closest to
Percy's time in the sanitarium recovering from TB in which he found being sick
was, perhaps, a blessed state in that it underlined how limited and precious
time is.  Failure, like success, is an opportunity for growth - but one
teaches humility far more efficiently than the other.

The Nazi's didn't like sickness and sought to purge it.  "Gott mit uns," they
said.  Yet there's Jesus hanging out with the lepers celebrating the blessed
state of poverty, material- and health-wise.  Like the river journey of baby
Moses poking fun at Egyptian funerary rights, we have in Percy's work a
rejection of that knotheaded drive for racial purity, for overarching
ideologies of immanent utopia.  The novel is an encyclopedia of dead ends, not
quite readily apparent until one is knee-deep in _Lost in the Cosmos_.

_Love in the Ruins_ is exactly as advertised - a lesson in the benefits of
failure, of life as a failed state.  (And from the sniper to the
revolutionaries, the prose is riddled with examples of literal, mostly
sardonic, state failure.)  As we read the narrative in undergrad class, it's a
humorous rejection of "the better living through chemistry" motto of the 20th
century.  (Which turned out to have the chemistry all wrong too, as we now
know from the research on transfats, processed sugar and the like.)

Humanity wants mystery, but Google doesn't know where to stick that in it's
LLM and sell ads on it.  We live in a digital world that loves sex and hates
love, digitizes books and destroys reading skills, gives us maps and leaves us
lost and unable to navigates.  There's Percy telling us, "I told you so."

Wade

Wade

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