Culture Making Articles items tagged louisiana

The trouble with interesting

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate
: ?Granted, these are the words of Walker Percy's least likable (and most sociopathic) protagonist. But it's the line from Lancelot that spurred me to reread it yet again. I'd actually recalled it a little differently: noting the shift from valuing things based on whether we thought they were good or bad, to whether they are interesting or boring.?

Yes, interest! The worm of interest. Are you surprised? No? Yes? One conclusion I have reached here after a year in my cell is that the only emotion people feel nowadays is interest or lack of it. Curiosity and interest and boredom have replaced the so-called emotions we used to read about in novels or see registered on actors’ faces. Even the horrors of the age translate into interest. Did you ever watch anybody pick up a newspaper and read the headline PLANE CRASH KILLS THREE HUNDRED? How horrible! says the reader. Is he horrified? No, he is interested. When was the last time you saw anybody horrified?

from Lancelot, by Walker Percy (1977)

Some dim dazzling trick of grace

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

Nate
: ?Come the start of Lent, I always think of the last paragraphs before the epilogue in Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer, when the narrator discusses his future as he sits in a parked car, simultaneously keeping watch over the comings and goings from the Ash Wednesday services at the new-built Catholic church across the street.?

The Negro has already come outside. His forehead is an ambiguous sienna color and pied: it is impossible to be sure he has received ashes. When he gets in his Mercury, he does not leave immediately but sits looking down at something on the seat beside him. A sample case? An insurance manual? I watch him closely in the rear-view mirror. It is impossible to say why he is here. Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importune bonus?

It is impossible to say.

from The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy (1960)

A pleasant nonplace

2025-01-02T22:53:00Z

A Chinese curse condemns one to live in interesting and eventful times. The best thing about Covington is that it is in a certain sense out of place and time but not too far out and therefore just the place for a Chinese scholar who asks nothing more than being left alone. One can sniff the ozone from the pine trees, visit the local bars, eat crawfish, and drink Dixie beer and feel as good as it is possible to feel in this awfully interesting century. And now and then, drive across the lake to New Orleans, still an entrancing city, eat trout amandine at Galatoire’s, drive home to my pleasant, uninteresting place, try to figure out how the world got into such a fix, shrug, take a drink, and listen to the frogs tune up.

—Walker Percy, "Why I Live Where I Live" (1990), collected in Signposts in a Strange Land