He lights up. “Tom, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful because it’s so simple. All great scientific breakthroughs are simple. One change and presto, all the old hassles, twelve-year-olds getting knocked up, contraceptives in school, abortion, child abuse—all the old political and religious hassles are simply bypassed, left behind. Did you ever notice that the great controversies…
Upriver and into West Feliciana, the first low loess bluffs of St. Francisville, and into the pleasant deciduous hills where Audubon lived with rich English planters, painted the birds, and taught dancing for a living. Out of the hills and back toward the river and Grand Mer, the great widening of the river into a…
Obituary and NYT profile William Christenberry’s work is a poetic evocation of a haunted countryside. . . . [that it] really says it all, because it [his work] deals not only with the Southern landscape of beauty and wonderment, but also the side of it that is haunted with memory and sadness. AlabamapaintingphotographyWalker PercyWilliam Christenberry
“Thus, these word signs have been evacuated, deprived of meaning something real. Real persons. Not so with Jews.” ***** “Since the Jews were the original chosen people of God, a tribe of people who are still here, they are a sign of God’s presence which cannot be evacuated. Try to find a hole in that…
“He told me that he had—ah—discovered a mathematical proof of what God’s will is, that is, what we must do in these dangerous times.” ***** There was more excitement in prison, more argument, more clash of ideology. In Alabama we were polarized every which way, into pro-nukes and anti-nukes, liberals and conservatives, atheists and believers,…
Here is the just published collection of papers in ZYGON. A big thanks to all the contributors and to ZYGON’S ecumenical editor for his patient shepherding of the project. benjamin alexanderElizabeth CoreyexistentialismJohn D. SykesPhilosophy of LanguagePhilosophy of sciencereligion and scienceStacey E. AkeWalker Percy
Having just cracked open a long anticipated bottle of Yellowstone I have bourbon on my mind — and this coincides with Julia Reed’s discussion taking wing from Walker Percy’s famous essay. Sociological musings aside, I’m of the view that the pitching of Bourbon vs Scotch is a false dichotomy: there is no legitimate comparison. If I had…
A lot happened to her. She married, not a Notre Dame boy, but Buddy Dupre, Ed’s brother, a pleasant Tulane DKE, not merely pleasant but charming, the sort of Southern charmer who drinks too much. He had that sweetness and funniness which alcoholic Southern men often have, as if they cannot bear for the world not…
There is a slight unpleasantness about doing a psychiatric consultation in a small general hospital. Here a psychiatrist is ranked somewhere between a clergyman and an undertaker. One is tolerated. One sees the patient only if the patient has nothing else to do. ***** “Very interesting. Okay, okay. Let’s skip the metaphysics. You get into…
I am straddling them, trying to wedge them apart. Good God: a New York-New Orleans Democrat Jew fighting it out with a Birmingham Italian Confederate Republican. ***** A discovery: A shrink accomplishes more these days by his fecklessness than by his lordliness in the great days of Freud. ***** Time was when I’d have tested…
manwithoutqualities 