I have to admire the St Louisan for his neat and well-ordered life, his gold pencil and his scissors-knife and his way of clipping articles on the convergence of the physical sciences and the social sciences; it comes over me that in the past few days my own life has gone to seed. I no…
He dramatically whipped from his pelvis the sheet, flapping it open. Among the yellow stains the word FORWARD was printed in high block letters in red crayon. Below this Crusade for Moorish Dignity was written in an intricate blue script. “Sheet? What sheet!” Ignatius replied. “I am holding before you the proudest of banners, an…
In Feliciana we used to speculate on the new messiah, the scientist-philosopher-mystic who would come striding through the ruins with the Gita in one hand and a Geiger counter in the other. Walker Percy, Philosopher existentialismphilosophical literatureWalker Percy
“We shall storm the office very shortly, thereby surprising the foe when his senses are still subject to the psychic mists of early morning.” “Hey, Mr. R., pardon me,” a man called out from the crowd. “Somebody tell me you in trouble with a po-lice. Is that right?” A wave of anxiety and uneasiness broke…
My mother’s family think I have lost my faith and they pray for me to recover it. I don’t know what they’re talking about. Other people, so I have read, are pious as children and later become skeptical (or, as they say on This I Believe: “in time I outgrew the creeds and dogmas of…
“Ain that fine. Whoa! I never go to school more than two year in my life. My momma out washing other people clothin, ain nobody talking about school. I spen all my time rollin tire aroun the street. I’m rollin, momma washing, nobody learning nothin. Shit! Who looking for a tire roller to give them…
She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees…
“The problem come from not havin no vocation skill,” Jones was saying to Mr. Watson. Jones was perched on a wooden stool, his legs bent under him like ice tongs ready to pick up the stool and boldly carry it away before Mr. Watson’s old eyes. “If I had some trainin I wouldn be mopping…
Yet it was on just such a day as this, an ordinary Wednesday or Thursday, that he felt the deepest foreboding. And when his doctor, seeking to reassure him, suggested that in these perilous times a man might well be entitled to such a feeling, that only the insensitive did not, etc., it made him…
Your total ignorance of that which you profess to teach merits the death penalty. I doubt whether you would know that St. Cassian of Imola was stabbed to death by his students with their styli. His death, a martyr’s honorable one, made him a patron saint of teachers. Pray to him, you deluded fool, you…
manwithoutqualities 