What does Walker Percy think?

If you're like me, you're wondering what Walker Percy makes of all this nonsense that we call day to day life. Or, at least what he thought circa 1960's when he was writing The Moviegoer.

"The Specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair" Kierkegaard


"What is the malaise? you ask. The malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo's ghost." (No joke Banquo's ghost came up twice in things I was reading today. Old timey people were serious about their Shakespeare).

"You say it is a simple thing surely, all gain and no loss, to pick up a good-looking woman and head for the beach on the first fine day of the year. So say the newspaper poets. Well it is no such simple thing and if you have ever done it, you know it isn't--unless, of course, the woman happens to be your wife or some other everyday creature as familiar to you that she is as invisible as you yourself. Where there is a chance of gain, there is also a chance of loss. Whenever one courts great happiness, one also risks malaise."

Later

"A good rotation. A rotation I define as the experiencing of the new beyond the expectation of the experiencing of the new. For example, taking one's first trip to Taxaco would not be a rotation, or no more than a very ordinary rotation; but getting lost on the way and discovering a hidden valley would be." Come on tickets to Europe, get cheaper. I want Slovenian valleys.

Later

"When someone made a spiel, one of our somber epic porch spiels, she would strain forward in the dark, trying to make out the face of the speaker and judge whether he meant to be taken as somberly as he sounded. As a Bollling in Feliciana Parish, I became accustomed to sitting on the porch in the dark and talking of the size of the universe and the treachery of men; as a Smith on the Gulf Coast I have become accustomed to eating crabs and drinking beer under a hundred and fifty watt bulb--and one is as pleasant a way as the other of passing a summer night." Indeed, my friend.

Later

"It was not my conscience that bothered me. What I am trying to tell you is that nothing seemed worth doing except something I couldn't even remember. If somebody had come up to me and said: if you will forget your preoccupations for forty minutes and get to work, I can assure you that you will find the cure of cancer and compose the greatest of all symphonies--I wouldn't have been interested. Do you know why? Because it wasn't good enough for me?"

Later

"The poor fellow. He has just begun to suffer from it, this miserable trick the romantic plays upon himself: of setting just beyond his reach the very thing he prizes. For he prizes just such a meeting, the chance meeting with a chance friend on a bus, a friend he can talk to, unburden himself of his terrible longings...He means that he hopes to find himself a girl, the rarest of rare pieces, and live the life of Rudolfo on the balcony, sitting around on the floor and experiencing soul-communion. I have my doubts. In the first place, he will defeat himself, jump ten miles ahead of himself, scare the wits out of some girl with his great choking silences, want her so desperately that by his own peculiar logic he can't have her; or having her, jump another ten miles beyond both of them and end by fleeing to the islands, where, propped at the rail of his ship in some rancid port, he will ponder his own loneliness." Preach it brother.

Later

"I am not ashamed to use the world class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we don't shrink from our obligations to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for mediocrity's sake. Oh I am aware that we hear a great many flattering things nowadays about your great common man--you know, it has always been revealing to me that he is perhaps content to be so called, because that is exactly what he is, the common man, and when I say common I mean common as hell. Our civilization has achieved a distinction of sorts. It will be remembered not for its technology nor even its wars but its novel ethos. Ours is the only civilization in history which has enshrined mediocrity as its national ideal."

Good times. I love some Southern rambling about decaying moral fiber. Who doesn't?