I’m curious to know Percy’s thoughts on the monastic life. His literature is filled with souls looking to find purpose in the everydayness of things, but what if someone checked out of everyday modernity in favor of the monastic?  Father Smith did this in The Thanatos Syndrome, and I wonder if Percy considered the life of a stylite the answer for those ready to commit to more than a Binx-like search.

When Tom Moore asks Father Smith why he became a priest, his response is simply “What else?” When pushed to elaborates he says that given the chance, one must choose life or death.

For centuries monastics have committed themselves to service, but once he was no longer able to serve the dying, Father Smith simply climbed to the top of a fire tower and wouldn’t come down. However, even in his seclusion he had a mission. He scanned the horizon looking for signs of trouble. When he found it, he triangulated the source and sounded an alarm. We all know that you can’t see the forest for the trees, but from Father Smith’s lofty heights he clearly saw the forest reach from hilltop to hilltop.

What I’m wondering if what happens after the search? What happens when we realize that we are pilgrims in a strange land? Should we do the best we can walking through the woods, or should we take to a tower ready to sound the alarm?

Tags: Father Smith, monastic, The Thanatos Syndrome

The Associated Press recently reported that a man in Michigan encountered an alligator in a corn field. Leaving aside the obvious opportunities for terror this provides Halloween corn maze aficionados, this event strikes me as a bad sign. Anyone who has read Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins knows to be on the lookout for vines sprouting through cracks in the concrete. Perhaps vines are nothing if alligators are now taking up residence in places like rural Michigan and cities like Chicago, Boston and New York.

Pick out your room at the nearest Howard Johnson motel. Begin to stockpile Vienna sausages, Campbell soup and Early Times whiskey. Things are getting interesting.

Tags: Love in the Ruins

Would have been his 94th (I think) today.

By Andy Whitman.

I commend this short blog entry by Fr. Robert Connor on Walker Percy’s quest to name himself.

The great work of Walker Percy is his struggle to name the “I” of Walker Percy. His life-long endeavor was to name himself, which was to give himself an identity and reason to exist.

He goes on to provide an insightful view of Percy existential mission. Fr. Connor has the unique ability to write in a very Percy-like fashion. Percy’s non-fiction is complex, yet he avoids complicated words. He had a way of stringing together simple statements to explore extremely dense concepts. Any man that loved semeiotics as much as he did must have a multi-layered understanding of language.

Tags: existentialism

According to Phil Oliver,  in the 1930s Walker Percy and lifelong friend Shelby Foote built a wood and stone teahouse near the University of the South in the hills surrounding Sewanee, Tennessee. Having been to Sewanee in the past, you can be sure that I will attempt to find this place when I return. At the risk of being impolite, I am going to post Dr. Oliver’s photo here, not to infringe on his privacy (if there is such a thing after you post a photo of yourself on a blog), but to show that this interesting artifact exists.

Update: After further research, this teahouse is likely located on the property of “Brinkwood,” the vacation home of Uncle Will Percy.  As mentioned by Dr. Oliver, this property is located very close to area known as Lost Cove. This densely wooded terrain is full of caves and crevices and is the likely inspiration for Will Barrett’s cave in The Second Coming.

Tags: Sewanee, Shelby Foote, teahouse, The Second Coming

Tom Bartlett recently wrote an entertaining homage to Lost in the Cosmos for the Chronicle of Higher Education. The article is aptly named, “Walker Percy’s Weirdest Book.” Mr. Barlett’s summary of the book is spot on:

Easily the strangest book he [Percy] wrote was Lost in the Cosmos, which is shelved among the nonfiction but is actually an indescribable concoction of hard facts and wild imagination, a parody of self-help books (sort of), a philosophy textbook (kind of), and a collection of short stories, quizzes, diagrams, thought experiments, mathematical formulas, made-up dialogue, ridiculously long chapter titles, and a few David Foster Wallace-worthy footnotes. It’s honestly great, or possibly terrible, depending on your level of patience for Percy’s stew of literary high jinks.

I suspect this book gives us the most unfiltered look into Percy’s mind.

Tags: Lost in the Cosmos, Tom Bartlett

Micah Mattix on the twentieth anniversary of Walker Percy’s death and his literary and intellectual legacy.

So, Jesus and Col. Sanders were walking down the street… stop me if you’ve heard this one before…

I couldn’t resist posting this photo as a summation of sorts of Walker Percy’s world.

Photo Credit

Russell Moore, dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote recently on the 20th anniversary of Walker Percy’s death.  In his post, Dr. Moore makes some interesting observations on Percy’s unique style.  I’ll provide one quote here, but it is worth reading all of Dr. Moore’s comments.

Percy’s apocalyptic writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, sounds so much different than the faux-apocalypticism of so much contemporary Christian “culture war” rhetoric. It’s direct, yes, about human sin and human guilt. He wasn’t writing to raise money from those who would love to have a “your future is bright” imprimatur for the way things are. But there’s a hopefulness there. Part of that is because Percy was writing for the human conscience, not to raise direct-mail money from the outraged.

Tags: Russell Moore