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…
Malick, the greatest living American filmmaker, has never made the consistently good fully philosophical film that we know he’s quite capable of. I fear that unless he dumps the star actors, he never will. I suppose that beginning with the Thin Red Line (after a 20 year hiatus) he understandably exploited high-priced luvvies eager to embellish their resume with…
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…
Having listened to some 100 hours of “rabbi” Jonathan Haidt I’ve come to this conclusion. (Yes, the usual scratched record names will be proffered along with the activist wannabes, but their time is now over, and long overdue at that — advocacy is not inquiry!). Haidt has the empirical credentials, the philosophical credentials and equally importantly he…
There is nothing like a liberal gone sour. ***** I told him this for two reasons. One was that it was the only reason he would believe, believing as he did that I was still a liberal and therefore capable of any madness. (Yet curiously it was for him an understandable madness: you know how…
Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, drink, even make love. But that is crazy. Why should people be miserable in good weather and happy in bad? Surely…
During the last months I found that I could be moderately happy if I simultaneously (1) drank, (2) read Raymond Chandler, and (3) listened to Beethoven. ***** The world had gone crazy, said the crazy man in his cell. What was nutty was that the movie folk were trafficking in illusions in a real world…
You should be interested! Such a quest serves God’s cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God? Or suppose the Lowell Professor of…
At least in Louisiana we knew how to take things easy. We could always drink. ***** Then I realized why I drank and smoked. It was a way of dealing with time. What to do with time? A fearful thing: a human body of ten billion cells ready to do any one of ten billion…
manwithoutqualities 