The Last Gentleman

by Walker Percy

Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

Often nowadays people do not know what to do and so live out their lives as if they were waiting for some sign or other.

There is a sort who does well in school and of whom much is heard and expected and who thereafter does less and less well and of whom finally is heard nothing at all. The high tide of life comes maybe in the last year of high school or the first year of college. Then life seems as elegant as algebra. Afterwards people ask, what happened to so and so? And the answer is a shrug. He was the sort who goes away.

In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor.

What happens to a man to whom all things seem possible and every course of action open? Nothing of course. Except war. If a man lives in the sphere of the possible and waits for something to happen, what he is waiting for is war—or the end of the world. That is why Southerners like to fight and make good soldiers. In war the possible becomes actual through no doing of one’s own.

The puzzle is: where does love pitch its tent?

Nor did he mind when they turned out to be Texans, golfers from a Fort Worth club, fortyish and firm as India rubber and fairly bursting their seersuckers.

Arguments are spoiled. Clownishness always intervenes.

He was sick with brain fever, whatever that is, I have only come across brain fever in Russian novels.

Malice was familiar ground. It was like finding oneself amid the furniture of one’s living room.

U.S. culture is the strangest in history, a society of decent generous sex-ridden men and women who leave each other to their lusts, the men off to the city and conventions, abandoning their wives to the suburbs, which are the very home and habitation of lewd dreams. A dirty deal for women, if you ask me.

The only difference between me and you is that you think that purity and life can only come from eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. I don’t know where it comes from.

Americans are the most Christian of all people and also the lewdest. I am no match for them! Do you know why it is that the Russians, who are atheists, are sexually modest, whereas Americans, the most Christian of peoples, are also the lewdest?

The task, he mused, was to give shape and substance to time itself. Time was turned on and running between them like the spools of a tape recorder. Was that not the nature of his amnesia: that all at once the little ongoing fillers of time, the throat-clearings and chair-scrapings and word-mumblings, stopped and the tape ran silent?

“He’s feeling sorry for himself and has taken to reading Kahlil Gibran, a bad sign even in healthy people.

There is no reentry from the orbit of transcendence.

Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don’t like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.