What to make, reader, of a rich middle-aged American sitting in a German car, holding a German pistol with which he will in all probability blow out his brains, smiling to himself and looking around old Carolina for the Jews whom he imagined had all disappeared? ***** “Marion thought the Jews, the strange history of…
Like many rich women, she loved a bargain. ***** Right: you said I will not put up with a life which is not life or death. I don’t have to and I won’t. ***** Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything.…
The only time I knew what to do was when something bad happened to somebody. Disaster gave me leave to act. Between times I didn’t know what to do. Now I know. ***** How did it happen that now for the first time in his life he could see everything so clearly? Something had given…
No, for that very reason he’d have done it—for the reason that he was, she saw at once, out of it, out of his life, he’d have been glad to do anything at all except whatever it was he was doing or not doing. So that she had only to say to him in the…
The only mystery is that nothing changes. Nothing really happens. Marriages, births, deaths, terrible wars had occurred but had changed nothing. War is not a change but a poor attempt to make a change. War and peace are not events. ***** And, strange to say, at the very moment of his remembering the distant past,…
What was my (your, our) discovery? That I could act. I was free to act. Is this something everyone knows or thinks he knows or, if he knows, knows in the wrong way? With gold-tinted corneas everything looks like gold but it’s fool’s gold. Here was the kind of gold-tinted corneas I had: Dr. Duk…
Ewell McBee, he reflected as he lay prone under the Rolls, was another example of the demented and farcical times we live in. Did the growing madness have something to do with the Jews pulling out? Who said we could get along without the Jews? Watch the Jews, their mysterious comings and goings and stayings!…
Surely, though, all is not well with a man who falls down in the fairway, and finds himself overtaken by unaccountable memories, memories of extraordinary power and poignancy. But memories of what? ***** He smiled. Yes, that was it. With two mirrors it is possible to see oneself briefly as a man among men rather…
The 10th May commemorates the death of Percy in 1990: this year marks the centenary of his birth. The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people’s lives were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he…
A few months ago I made a posting concerning Wim Wenders, Peter Handke and Walker Percy. In conversation/correspondence with a filmmaker chum I mentioned that of all Percy’s novels The Thanatos Syndrome would be the most translatable into the modality that is film since it works brilliantly and disturbingly as a thriller on a purely surface level. My…
manwithoutqualities 