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

["honeyjbc1 ." <honeyjbc AT gmail.com>]

Charles Percy,

You need no longer apologize that you are not a poet or a scholar.

I always love your comments. They derive from lots of information and experience. Your observations are clear, direct and helpful to all readers of Percy.

So from now on you can dispense with the apologies about your limitations. You have none sir.

Janet Cantor

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020, 1:35 PM Charles Lowry <lowry.charles AT gmail.com> wrote:

I both envy and admire the earlier contributions to this thread, since I have no talent for the lyrical and no capacity for the scholarly, but I offer a tidbit.  I think Jay Tolson, from his masterful biography of Percy, might have a contribution to make here.  He offers an interesting slant on Paul Elie's perspective: "Artist though he was, Percy became and remained a moralist who saw the end of art not in formal perfection but in the adequacy of its gesturing toward the truth that would make him free."  Tolson offers us an important piece of context on truth and freedom by reminding us of Pascal's observation that the source of all human misery is the inability to sit alone and content in one's own room.  Binx embraces what he knows will be this misery, because he has figured out that this is also the only path that leads to even the possibility of joy and authenticity.

     "What do you plan to do?"

     I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves

     into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for

     good and selfish reasons......

Along the way, though, he has picked up a thing or two, as eloquently summarized by an anonymous Knopf copywriter: "Binx's rediscovery of the strengths of his tradition coincides with his new-found capacity to encounter and love Kate as a person in her own right."  Contrary to Pascal's advice, Binx has left his room, has transformed himself from observer to actor, has stuck himself into the world.  It is not always easy, and the results are unpredictable, but for Binx it is a very humanizing process.  As an example, simply compare the tenor of Binx's early conversations with Aunt Emily to his conversation with her after his return from Chicago.  It is as straightforward as the transition from certitude to struggle.  Percy does a masterful job in taking us along to observe Binx's journey.  And that is why I love The Moviegoer.

Chuck Lowry

Brooklyn, New York 

On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 12:50 PM Lauren Berdy <lauren.stacy.berdy AT gmail.com> wrote:

I always believed that Dr Percy

Turned towards Catholicism

(Dostoevsky too, never straddled )

Because

Christ discovered 

Love 

What humans have done with this

Discovery is

Dr Percy’s landscape.

Everything else is

Material thought . Mostly Our illusions.

Which isn’t 

Faith.

Existentialists never have vibrated

As close as Dr P towards 

The ground of

I/thou

It’s the only ground 

And still

The biggest mystery 

It’s not an intellectual discussion it’s

The only thing that exists.

Take gd care in this Very messy world 

Lauren

 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 10, 2020, at 11:52 AM, Thomas Gollier <tgollier AT gmail.com> wrote:



Lauren,

I liked your message in response the Paul Elie's lecture. Binx does find love, an I-Thou relationship, but what I
liked about 'The Moviegoer' was where he found it. Paul Elie says:

   His sense of what a writer does — and this owed in part to his philosophy and in part to a southern upbringing
   — was that communication is intersubjective. You don't write for yourself, you write to reach another
   person, and it takes two to make a truth and then you dick over that truth, and you figure something else out.
   So his philosophical essays were diminished by the lack of an audience.

Binx finds love, as Walker Percy finds truth, in 'everydayness'. The search for Binx leads to and back from the
movies and Aunt Emily's cultural mores, like for Percy it leads him to and back from semiotic and existential

philosophy, to where it began. I like to think Percy didn't sweat "the lack of an audience" for either his

philosophical essays or his literary novels. He was speaking to neither philosophers nor critics but to individuals

living in their 'everydayness'. And to what can be found there. It's not surprising he had to be back-doored into

the National Book Award and literature, and too bad that hasn't quite happened with philosophy.

Thanks,
Tom

On Thu, Jan 9, 2020 at 6:49 AM Lauren Berdy <lauren.stacy.berdy AT gmail.com> wrote:

I listened carefully.

It was the crucial act of Dr Percy

At least for these eyes to show

us the desolate decline of love

In the world.

And

Showing us the daring adventure of

Human relations

The quicksand of our mental

Possessiveness 

And that self possession can be

Restored 

Even the Moviegoer filled withdeep life illusions Ends with an 

I and a thou

We are that I and thou

That’s the mystery

It’s nuff for this one reader

Reread 

“Allie and Will“ dialogues

Poems of illumination 

Out of the dark cave into the illumined light of love.

“ deep might call unto deep”

Sent from my iPhone

On Jan 8, 2020, at 12:05 AM, Henry P. Mills <wppdirector AT gmail.com> wrote:

Dear Percy-L:

Perhaps this recent, close revisit to The Moviegoer by Mr. Elie could be a good start to 2020. As always, comments to the community are welcome. Enjoy!

Henry Mills

Percy-L Administrator

_________________________________________________

Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Seen Again by Paul Elie

This lecture by Prof. Paul Elie (Georgetown) was given as part of "The Moral Imagination of the Novel", a conference held at Columbia University on 4-5 October 2019. 

The conference was co-hosted by the Morningside Institute, Columbia University's Department of Philosophy, and the Thomistic Institute.

https://www.morningsideinstitute.org/podcast/2019/10/30/walker-percys-the-moviegoer-seen-again-paul-elie

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