“What is a repetition? A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle. Last week, for example, I experienced…
Here is astrophysicist Adam Frank’s insightful look at Walker Percy’s wonderful book. I don’t share Frank’s nor Lawler’s nor Percy’s optimism but I’m trying very hard. Also check out Peter Lawler’s take on LITC. There is one book that begins to answer these questions and I’m happy to pass it on. Walker Percy’s “Lost In…
Once, in a small-town bar, Percy observed this: “You sit here and listen, and it doesn’t take long to realize that a lot of the ‘existentialism’ of the intellectual is close to the heart of the person next to you, having a beer after a day in a shrimp boat, or working on a farm,…
A pre-novelist Walker Percy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 16, No. 4 (Jun., 1956), pp. 522-530. A POSSIBLE BRIDGE FROM EMPIRICISM If it is true that both Anglo-American empiricism and European existentialism contain valid insights, then in respect of the failure to make a unifying effort toward giving an account of all realities, the former…
H/T to Rod Dreher Distilled especially to help one weather the existential fallout of Western civilization. Guaranteed 100% free of noxious particles. existentialismlove in the ruinsphilosophical literaturePhilosophyWalker PercyWalker Percy Weekend
Immersed in reading Percy it has become blindingly clear that these two writers have such similar concerns. de Unamuno’s the Tragic Sense of Life rates as having made the most profound of impressions upon me — and that was going on thirty years ago. Whatever else separates Percy and de Unamuno, it is my view that de…
He was unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. . . . Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with…
Here is one of the more thoughtful, subtle and insightful takes on one of Percy’s masterpieces. existentialismphilosophical literaturethe last gentlemanWalker Percy
Michael Baruzzini‘s thoughts on Percy’s famous “ode” to Bourbon. (A companion piece is Luis Buñuel’s recipe for the perfect Martini mentioned in his autobiography and perhaps most famously in the film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — for another time). Not only should connoisseurs of bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the…
Alan Sokal weighs in again thanks to Nick Brown who was troubled by the conclusion that The mysteries of love, happiness, fulfilment, success, disappointment, heartache, failure, experience, random luck, environment, culture, gender, genes, and all the other myriad ingredients that make up a human life could be reduced to the figure of 2.9013. It’s quite astonishing…
manwithoutqualities 