all humans are in a predicament the predicament of being a human
a knothead is part of this mad picnic everyone is in the basket
Dr Percy sucked crayfish with known Klansman......
we are all in trouble
On 5/27/2015 12:30 PM, Karl M. Terrell wrote:
FBB557B9-24E3-4612-819F-D2945B491652 AT stokeswagner.com" type="cite">
Hello, I am new to the list, but have been reading Percy since
college, around 1987.
Percy's 99th birthday this week prompted me to search for a quote I
have seen attributed to him:
"Fiction doesn’t tell us something we don’t know, it tells us
something we know but don’t know that we know."
I have not been able to locate a source for the quote.
This paradoxical idea of "unknown knowns" fills a gap in the
Rumsfeldian epistemology of "known knowns," "known unknowns," and
"unknown unknowns."
Can anyone provide the source for the quote above? The closest I could
find was from an interview he gave in the Paris Review in 1987,
reprinted in More Conversations with Walker Percy:
"The most commonplace example of the cognitive dimension in fiction is
the reader’s recognition---sometimes the shock of recognition---the
"verification" of a sector of reality that he had known but not known
that he had known. I think of letters I get from readers, which may
refer to a certain scene and say, in effect, yes! that’s the way it
is!"