My wife and I lived a good life. We used to get up in the morning in a beautiful house, sit down to breakfast in our “enclosed patio,” watch Barbara Walters talk about sexual intercourse on the Today show. Nevertheless, I fell prey to morning terror, shook like a leaf at the breakfast table, and…
I’m not at all sure that Uncle Will suffered from a tragic flaw, indeed I’m firmly of the view that he didn’t. Still, on the whole an OK (ish) article (that over-plays the Catholic card). Best be advised that for an infinitely more finessed understanding of the topic one should read Uncle Will’s (Percy) most incredibly beautiful…
The first thing a man remembers is longing and the last thing he is conscious of before death is exactly the same longing. I have never seen a man die who did not die in longing. . . . As for me, I was a smart boy and at the age of twenty-six bade fair…
NOMA (H/T to Cory MacLauchlin) While in Louisiana, Youd will be performing live in NOMA’s galleries and in locations throughout the state, retyping a series of novels set in Louisiana that will include everything from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer to John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. a confederacy of duncesJohn Kennedy Toolenew orleansphilosophical literaturethe moviegoerTim You’dWalker…
I, for example, am a Roman Catholic, albeit a bad one. I believe in the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church, in God the Father, in the election of the Jews, in Jesus Christ His Son our Lord, who founded the Church on Peter his first vicar, which will last until the end of the…
Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up…
Stuart Mitchner in Town Topics Percy intuits the possibility of a Katrina might seem a given, but what sets his book apart is its fortuitous all but prophetic awareness of something that did not take place until 15 years after his death. It’s as if the book had been created in the shadow of imminent…
Perhaps this moment more than any other, the moment of his first astonishment, marked the beginning for the engineer of what is called a normal life. From that time forward it was possible to meet him and after a few minutes form a clear notion of what sort of fellow he was and how he…
The game was the thing. One became impatient with non-game happenings—a nurse coming in to empty the urinal. Time disposed itself in short tolerable stretches between the bright beads of the games. The score itself, toted up and announced, had the cheerful workaday effect of a small tidy business. It came to be understood too…
He sat down under the cistern and sniffed a handful of soil. The silence was disjunct. It ran concurrently with one and did not flow from the past. Each passing second was packaged in cottony silence. It had no antecedents. Here was three o’clock but it was not like three o’clock in Mississippi. In Mississippi…
manwithoutqualities 