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

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  • From: lowry.charles AT gmail.com
  • To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [percy-l] Percy Treasure-Trove
  • Date: Fri, 7 Feb 2025 14:47:44 -0500

Thanks, Michael.  This was a very interesting and evocative article.  It put me in mind at once of Eudora Welty’s remarks at the NYC memorial service for Walker Percy at St. Ignatius Loyola.

<<The physician's ear and the writer's ear are pressed alike to the human chest, listening for the same signs of life, and with the same hope and with a like involvement in the outcome.

<<Each listens for the heartbeat with his own heart, scans the brain of his fellow man with his own brain, to find out whether mankind is living or dying at the moment.>>

Love in the Ruins was the second Percy book I read (I think we all started with the same one, huh Binx?), and I remember thinking that its outstanding trait had to be its comic elements.  How I yearned to be a middle-aged man with three women stashed in separate rooms in a Howard Johnson’s with no other guests!  And to think that my fortifications included a closet full of cases of Early Times bourbon!

Or would you rather be displaced Seattle engineer Barry Bocock, who believed that “there is nothing wrong with the world that couldn’t be set right by controlling germs and human waste”?

By the end of the book, there is “[o]nly one woman to my name now, a lusty tart Presbyterian, but one is enough.”

While the book indeed treats serious topics as described by Eudora Welty, it is also laugh out loud funny.  Thanks for the reminder.

Chuck Lowry
Brooklyn, New York

On Feb 7, 2025, at 12:45 PM, Michael Martin Serafin <michael_serafin AT hotmail.com> wrote:


This is one of many articles directly or indirectly about Percy on this website:

http://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/from-technology-to-sacrament-a-medical-pilgrimage-with-walker-percy/


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