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  • From: John L Pearson <johnlpearson AT icloud.com>
  • To: percy list <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] Love in the Ruins—DiscussionQuestions for “July 1” Chapters 1-5
  • Date: Fri, 12 Jun 2026 23:31:43 -0500

Wade,
What a great case you make for the novel’s relevance to our current moment. I think it’s been 30 years since I last read Love in the Ruins, and you have whetted my appetite to read it again. 
Your last paragraph made me think of Greg Brown singing his wife’s song “Let the Mystery Be.” I agree that mystery enriches life, and much is beyond our finite understanding, so there will always be mystery, whether Google likes it or not. Bruce Cockburn sings “You can’t tell me there is no mystery, it overflows my cup.” All of which is to say thanks for this post. When my brain gets stimulated it often drifts to song lyrics that have helped make me who I am. 
I am traveling the next two weeks—an annual pilgrimage to the San Juan mountains for four days of music in the paradise of Telluride and then exploring mining ghost towns and high passes. All a perfect setting to reread Love in the Ruins. I don’t know how good an Internet connection I’ll have, but I’ll chime in here if I can, and I’ll be back end of June. 

Now in these dread latter days of the old USA…I’m looking forward to spending some time with Tom More again. I’ll be seeking mystery and trying to learn the benefits of life as a failed state. I’ve reached 66 and found that continues to be a lifelong quest. It’s got to be the going, not the getting there that’s good.

John


John Pearson


On Jun 12, 2026, at 1:24 PM, Wade Riddick <wriddick AT usa.net> wrote:

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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