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

[lowry.charles AT gmail.com]



In thinking about Janet’s and Rhonda’s comments about Percy and Dostoyevsky, I was reminded of my own experience.  As I suppose many of us who are not academics did, I read Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace and Anna Karenina in the days of my youth, and not since.  Three years ago, for no reason I can actually discern, I picked Crime and Punishment off the shelf to take with me on a business trip.  I was overwhelmed.  Surely the book I read in 1970 as a junior in college, playing softball and drinking beer, was not the same book I was reading at 10:30 P.M. in a room at the Parker House Hotel on Tremont Street in Boston?  Of course, it was exactly the same book.  I was just not the same person.  Since that shock, I have done the same thing with titles such as Brideshead Revisited, Jude the Obscure, The Magic Mountain, Ulysses, Catcher in the Rye, and a couple others, some after an absence of fifty years, some after an absence of only half that much.  In every case, the rewards were massive.

I pretty much have Percy, along with Virgil, Dante and Eliot, on “regular repeat,” and I still find something new in them every time.  I suppose Percy would call it a rotation or a repetition—as much as I love the novels, some of those things still confuse me, thereby proving I am not nearly as smart as I think I am.

So thanks to Janet and Rhonda for reminding me, and surely others, of the joys of drawing water from familiar wells!  

Chuck Lowry

Brooklyn, New York

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 29, 2021, at 2:14 PM, RHONDA MCDONNELL <rhonda_mcdonnell AT msn.com> wrote:

 How wonderful!! I’ll definitely give it a listen. I have Wilson’s book on Percy and Dostoyevsky, but I confess I have not yet read it. Thanks for the reminder,  Janet. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Jun 29, 2021, at 12:10 PM, janetcantor37--- via Percy-L <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org> wrote:



https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/greatbooks-tapes.nationalreview.media/greatbooks-186-06.29.2021.mp3

Jessica Hooten Wilson, great Percy scholar, strikes again.

Here she is interviewed by John Miller about Crime and Punishment in a marvelous half hour full of wonderful insights. I didn't know that Raskolnikov's name had "split" in it and all the ramifications of that image.

I hope this will interest Percy lovers since Dostoyevsky was so much underneath Percy novels.

Janet Cantor

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