To: "Walker Percy List" <percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org>
Subject: [percy-l] Re Lit Crit on Percy - Where to Start?
Date: Sun, 24 Feb 2008 12:50:12 +0100
An extract from Robert Eckert's posting:
>> In one interview, Percy, when asked a question concerning something about living at another time, said he would like to sit on a park bench in NYC in the year 2050 to see how we were doing.
To see if we made it. >> Will we? >> Percy's questions concerning human destiny are still relevant. >> Even more so in a post 9/11 age. >> Bad people possess the capability to inflict inordinate damage
upon you and everything you know.
I have a feeling that, if Walker Percy were still with us and could respond, he might point out that it's not only the bad people (Them) but the good people (Us) who all too often inflict inordinate damage
upon a great many people.
My guess is that his response would be along the same lines as something Thomas Merton (a writer Percy greatly admired) wrote while the Vietnam War was gaining momentum.
Having read Hannah Arendt's book about the trial in Jerusalem of
Adolph Eichmann, the chief bureaucrat of the Holocaust. Merton was inspired to write an essay: "A Devout Meditation in Memory of Adolf Eichmann."
Eichmann, Merton noted, had been declared sane by examining
psychiatrists. This sane man who had been involved in the death of millions seemed to Merton an archetype of all those who were brilliant perfecters of new technologies of killing. They were simply doing their job, following orders, being good citizens, etc.
Merton wrote:
"The sanity of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world
to preserve it from barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the
buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.... No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons,
for firing the shot. They will be obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command." [Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions, 1966), 45-53.]
Of course we regard ourselves as sane, not to mention good and
decent and even God-fearing. In the Hollywood movie we make of ourselves, we're never the bad guys.
* * * Nancy and I have been keeping a journal that follows our recent kidney transplant. A blog has been set up for this purpose -- A Tale of Two Kidneys. See: http://ataleof2kidneys.blogspot.com/
* * *
[percy-l] Re Lit Crit on Percy - Where to Start?,
Jim Forest, 02/24/2008