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…
When he woke, it was very cold. He lit the propane panel ray and, as he waited for the cabin to warm, caught sight of his own name in Sutter’s casebook. Barrett: His trouble is he wants to know what his trouble is. His “trouble,” he thinks, is a disorder of such a character that…
Walter Isaacson in today’s NYT But Percy’s theory about the redemptive power of hurricanes goes beyond the fact that dangerous situations allow us to become action heroes or saints. “True, people help each other in catastrophes,” he wrote in “Lancelot.” “But they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because…
Suicide considered as consequence of the spirit of abstraction and of transcendence; lewdness as sole portal of reentry into world demoted to immanence; reentry into immanence via orgasm; but post-orgasmic transcendence 7 devils worse than first. Man who falls victim to transcendence as the spirit of abstraction, i.e., elevates self to posture over and against…
Here he used to walk with his father and speak of the galaxies and of the expanding universe and take pleasure in the insignificance of man in the great lonely universe. His father would recite “Dover Beach,” setting his jaw askew and wagging’ his head like F.D.R.: for the world which seems To lie before…
Sutter wrote: A w.d. and n. white male, circa 49. Eyes, ears, nose, mouth: neg. (upper dentures). Skin: 12 cm. contusion rt. occipital region Pleura: Neg. Lungs: Neg. Pericardium: 10 cc. pink frothy fluid Heart: infarcted anterior wall right ventricle; coronary artery: moderate narrowing, occasional plaque; recent occlusion anterior descending branch, right c.a. Abdomen: neg.…
Jamie told him that Sutter drove an Edsel to remind him of the debacle of the Ford Motor Company and to commemorate the last victory of the American people over marketing research and opinion polls. The engineer wasn’t sure he liked the sound of this. It had the sound of a quixotic type who admires…
manwithoutqualities 