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.…
Here are a couple of documentaries sketching out the genius of these two musicians. Much of what they wrote and sang about is as salient now as it ever was. Of course, the “intelligentsia” or the “guardians of free speech” would not approve of their “ghetto talk” that eventually went onto influence hip-hop and rap, something…
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…
Recent article freely available here. AbsurddespairexistentialismfaithKierkegaardthe moviegoerWalker Percy
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…
This in The Atlantic (H/T to Shannon Selin) If you’ve got only 10 minutes, read his essay “A Much Repeated Repetition.” (“Of a mechanical thing we have a full knowledge. Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance.”) Why should it want to make him a saint? Why Chesterton and not—if you’re talking about…
A travel article (who in N.O. talks of “the Big Easy”?) . . . and realized, once again, that there’s no better place to find Walker Percy than inside the pages of his many dazzling novels, which I’d fallen in love with years ago. a confederacy of duncesJohn Kennedy TooleLiteratureLouisiananew orleansphilosophical literatureTennessee Williamsthe moviegoerTruman CapoteWalker Percywilliam…
manwithoutqualities 