Born on this day. If you can’t make it to the upcoming Second Annual Walker Percy Weekend and you haven’t already seen this excellent documentary, check it out. existentialismLouisiananew orleansphilosophical literaturePhilosophyWalker PercyWalker Percy Weekendwin riley
An old review of Lodge’s Consciousness and the Novel by Galen Strawson. consciousnessdavid lodgeGalen StrawsonLiteraturephilosophical literaturephilosophy and the novel
I told her (I always remember the remote past first). ‘It was an orange-colored cotton twill sort of material.’ ‘That was my piqué,’ says she as normally as you please.” For some reason he flushed and fell silent. . . . Jamie—who, he was told, had a severe and atypical mononucleosis—saw him as a fellow…
He sized them up as Yankee sort of Southerners, the cheerful, prosperous go-getters one comes across in the upper South, in Knoxville maybe, or Bristol. “Where’re you from,” cried Mrs. Vaught in a mock-accusatory tone he recognized and knew how to respond to. “Ithaca,” he said, smiling. “Over in the Delta.” He felt himself molt.…
Two things were instantly apparent to the sentient engineer, whose sole gift, after all, was the knack of divining persons and situations. One was that he had been mistaken for a member of the staff. The other was that the stranger was concerned about a patient and that he, the stranger, had spent a great…
For the thousandth time Dr. Gamow looked at his patient—who sat as usual, alert and pleasant—and felt a small spasm of irritation. It was this amiability, he decided, which got on his nerves. There was a slyness about it and an opacity which put one off. It had not always been so between them. For…
Happy people were worse off in their happiness in museums than anywhere else, he had noticed sometime ago. In here the air was thick as mustard gas with ravenous particles which were stealing the substance from painting and viewer alike. Though the light was technically good, illuminating the paintings in an unexceptionable manner, it nevertheless…
The sun is shining, people live well, go about satisfying their needs and achieving goals, work at creative jobs, attend cultural attractions, participate in interesting groups. This is, by every calculation, as it should be. Yet it was on just such a day as this, an ordinary Wednesday or Thursday, that he felt the deepest…
“The greatest curse brought down on us by technology is that it prevents us from escaping the present even for a brief time. Previous generations could retreat into solitude and seclusion when disaster struck; it was our fate to be aware of everything catastrophic happening everywhere in the world at the hour and the second…
So thoroughly in fact did he identify with his group companions of the moment, so adept did he become at role-taking, as the social scientists call it, that he all but disappeared into the group. As everyone knows, New York is noted for the number and variety of the groups with which one might associate, so…
manwithoutqualities 