The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much. Søren Kierkegaard,

ONE FINE DAY IN early summer a young man lay thinking in Central Park. His head was propped on his jacket, which had been folded twice so that the lining was outermost, and wedged into a seam of rock.

Thereafter he came to see that he was not destined to do everything but only one or two things. Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

But so powerful was the instrument that it was hard to say which building was being looked at. It was as if the telescope created its own world in the brilliant theater of its lenses.

and down it would come smoking, at two hundred miles an hour, big feet stuck out in front like a Stuka, strike the pigeons in mid-air with a thump and a blue flak-burst of feathers.

Being of both a scientific and a superstitious turn of mind and therefore always on the lookout for chance happenings which lead to great discoveries, he had to have a last look—much as a man will open a telephone book and read the name at his thumbnail.

There she was, not twenty feet away and shimmering slightly in the pressed optic air as if she sat at the bottom of a sunlit ocean. Her coarse hair gave off rainbows.

It was an old-style bench, the sort built many years ago of a porous tufalike concrete in which pebbles had been set like raisins in a cake. A sad yellow 1901 concrete it was, enough to strike a pang to the heart.

As he watched, the hand shattered into rainbows and disappeared. In another second the woman herself was gone, vanishing into the blue nimbus which rimmed the circle of light.

He fell in love, at first sight and at a distance of two thousand feet.

It was not so much her good looks, her smooth brushed brow and firm round neck bowed so that two or three vertebrae surfaced in the soft flesh, as a certain bemused and dry-eyed expression in which he seemed to recognize—himself!

Even now he made the highest possible scores on psychological aptitude tests, especially in the area of problem-solving and goal-seeking. The trouble was he couldn’t think what to do between tests.

New York is full of people from small towns who are quite content to live obscure lives in some out-of-the-way corner of the city.

It was an honorable and violent family, but gradually the violence had been deflected and turned inward.

More than anything else, he wished to act with honor and to be thought well of by other men. So living for him was a strain. He became ironical.

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.

As for the present young man, the last of the line, he did not know what to think. So he became a watcher...

It seemed to him that if he could figure out what was wrong with the man he would learn the great secret of life.

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.

Much of the time he was like a man who has just crawled out of a bombed building. Everything looked strange. Such a predicament, however, is not altogether a bad thing. Like the sole survivor of a bombed building, he had no secondhand opinions and he could see things afresh.

Most of this young man’s life was a gap. The summer before, he had fallen into a fugue state and wandered around northern Virginia for three weeks, where he sat sunk in thought on old battlegrounds, hardly aware of his own name.

Here I am surrounded by good fellows and the spirit of Old Nassau and wishing instead I was lying in a ditch in Wyoming or sitting in a downtown park in Toledo.

“Hm,” he muttered and peered at his eyeballs in the mirror. “This is no place for me for another half hour, let alone two years.”

Forty minutes later he sat on a bus, happy as a lark, bound for New York, where he lived quite contentedly at the Y.M.C.A.

that's right

he heard his father speak with his clients, a murmurous sound compounded of grievance and redress.

At the end of summer his father died. Though his death was sudden, people were less surprised than they might have been, since it was well known that in this particular family the men died young, after short tense honorable lives, and the women lived another fifty years, lived a brand new life complete with a second girlhood, outings with other girls, 35,000 hearty meals, and a long quarrelsome senescence.

It was at that time that he came near joining the ranks of the town recluses who sit dreaming behind their shutters thirty or forty years while the yard goes to jungle and the bugs drone away the long summer days.

served two years in the United States Army, where he took a large number of courses in electronics and from which he was honorably and medically discharged when he was discovered totally amnesic and wandering about the Shenandoah Valley between Cross Keys and Port Republic, sites of notable victories of General Stonewall Jackson.

Not only did he have ample time to read and ponder, the job also offered excellent health and retirement benefits. After twenty-three years he could retire and go home, where, if the ranks of old ladies had thinned out, he could let out rooms and live like a king.

As everyone knows, New York is noted for the number and variety of the groups with which one might associate, so that even a normal person sometimes feels dislocated. As a consequence this young man, dislocated to began with, hardly knew who he was from one day to the next.

There were times when he took roles so successfully that he left off being who he was and became someone else.

As they sat this night around the fire in the ski lodge, he and his fellow Ohioans, eyes sparkling, cheeks rosy, Tom and Jerries in hand, heads on laps, the Southerner felt a familiar and disastrous sinking of heart.

Shivering with pain and cold, he gazed up at the shadowy knoll associated by tradition with Mad Anthony Wayne.

Though science taught that good environments were better than bad environments, it appeared to him that the opposite was the case.

Midge and the counterman, he noticed, were very happy. The hurricane blew away the sad, noxious particles which befoul the sorrowful old Eastern sky and Midge no longer felt obliged to keep her face stiff.

In here the air was thick as mustard gas with ravenous particles which were stealing the substance from painting and viewer alike.

it is necessary to play a trick such as watching a man who is watching, standing on his shoulders, so to speak. There are several ways of getting around the ravenous particles.

There is the painting which has been bought at great expense and exhibited in the museum so that millions can see it. What is wrong with that? Something, said the engineer, shivering and sweating behind a pillar.

These lenses did not transmit light merely. They penetrated to the heart of things. The conviction grew upon him that his very life would be changed if he owned the telescope.

Beyond any doubt, he said to himself, this proves that bricks, as well as other things, are not as accessible as they used to be. Special measures were needed to recover them. The telescope recovered them.

Trophies they were sure enough, these dazzling wares offered every day, trophies to put him off the scent while the patient got clean away.

He did not know how not to give away nothing.

The doctor didn’t like his patient much, to tell the truth. They were not good friends. Although they had spent a thousand hours together in the most intimate converse, they were no more than acquaintances.

he chose his words like bonbons, so that his patients, whose lives were a poor meager business, received the pleasantest sense of the richness and delectability of such everyday things as words.

It was, he reckoned, the drollness of the past which struck her, the perky purpose of the people who acted for all the world as if they knew what they were doing, had not a single doubt.

now as they shook their heads dolefully at the tragedy they became happy in their misery. Color returned to their cheeks and they left the train with a spring in their step.

Every day the sky grew more paltry and every day the ravening particles grew bolder.

Luck would be this: if he saw her snatch a purse, flee into the park pursued by the cops. Then he would know something and could do something. He could hide her in a rocky den he had discovered in a wild section of the park. He would bring her food and they would sit and talk until nightfall, when they could slip out of the city and go home to Alabama. Such a turn of events was unlikely, however.

“The Failure of Coitus as a Mode of Reentry into the Sphere of Immanence from the Sphere of Transcendence.”