Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Walker Percy
Read between
September 20, 2018 - May 1, 2020
There was a hint of an uproar abroad in the night, a teeming in the air and the sense of coming closer with each step to a primal openness.
“Darling,” said the engineer, not to be surpassed—was this it at last, the august secret of the Western world?
But is love a sweetnesse or a wantonnesse, he wondered.
It was too much for a man to follow, he mused, these lightning hikuli-transformations from Kitty as great epithelial-warm pelvic-upcurving-melon-immediate Maja to Kitty as waif, huddled under his arm all ashiver and sour with gastric acid.
So if she reads something the night before—she reads at all hours—she’ll put it in the bench for me to read during my lunch. I owe her a great deal. Now she wants me to go to Europe with her. I owe her the pleasure she will take in showing it to me. But first I have to make sure of my own motives. I wrote Sutter that. I conceal nothing from him.
It began to rain, a fine dirty Jersey drizzle, and he took refuge in the pagoda, which was empty but for scraps of ancient newspapers, a sepia rotogravure section depicting Lucky Lindy’s visit to Lakehurst in 1928.
Already, even as he stooped, smiling, to stow his gear through the back door, which had been opened for him, he had registered his benefactor without quite looking at him.
He explained that he was not speaking of ordinary pollution but of a far more fundamental principle. Rather was it his conviction that man’s very best efforts to improve his environment, by air-conditioning and even by landscaping, upset a fundamental law which it took millions of years to evolve. “You take your modern office building, as tastefully done as you please. What does it do to a man to uproot him from the earth? There is the cause of your violence!”
“That’s your reaction to artificial environments in general! Wonderful! Don’t you see how it dovetails?” The engineer nodded reluctantly. He did not see.
He could tell that the other expected him to be surprised, but it was not in him to be surprised because it was no more surprising to him when things did not fall out as they were supposed to than when they did.
Or do we speak of —ing man to man, jokingly, literarily, with no thought of —ing anyone in the vicinity? His radar boggled.
The poor engineer arose, faint with fatigue, and threw a few final combination punches to clear his head.
How familiar were these steep streets and old 1937 brick-and-limestone high schools and the sooty monkey Pullman smell.
felt the strongest compulsion to return to the United States, seek out the most commonplace environment, and there, like Descartes among the Burghers of Amsterdam, descend within himself and write the first real war novel, an absolutely unvarnished account of one day’s action of one infantry platoon.
the latter as garrulous and shaky as ever and noticing nothing, his nerve ends firing at the slightest breeze, even nodding to the householders on the next lawn, whom he fancied to be well-wishers of some sort. They were not well-wishers. They stood about silently, hands in pockets, and kicking the turf.
in, hand,
Typo extra comma
The engineer perceived that the other set great store by getting along with his neighbors—like Descartes—and so was in a quandary.
No doubt he was correct, because he was experiencing the interior dislocations which always afflicted him on old battlegrounds. His nose was better and he could smell. He sniffed the morning. It was white and dim and faraway as Brooklyn but it was a different sort of whiteness and dimness.
Here the dimness was private and one’s own. He may not have been here before but it seemed to him that he had.
His face reassured him. It was all of a piece, an equable lower-South Episcopal face. He began to feel better and, standing up, threw a few combinations at the rising sun.
My name is Williston Bibb Barrett, he said aloud, consulting his wallet to make sure, and I am returning to the South to seek my fortune and restore the good name of my family, perhaps even recover Hampton plantation from the canebrakes and live out my days as a just man and little father to the faithful Negroes working in the fields.
He heard himself speak without consulting his memory. His voice had a memory of its own. “My understanding was yall were going to pick me up. I waited for three hours.”
His whorled police-dog eye did not quite look at the engineer but darted close in a gentle nystagmus of recognitions, now focusing upon a mote in the morning air just beside the other’s head, now turning inward to test what he saw and heard against his own private register.
Yes, and that was the wonder of it, that what was private and unspeakable before is speakable now because you speak it.
like me he lives in the sphere of the possible, all antenna, ear cocked and lips parted. But I am conscious of it, know what is up, and he is not and does not. He is pure aching primary awareness and does not even know that he doesn’t know it.
The women liked to stand and talk and look at houses. They were built for standing, pelvises canted, and they more or less leaning on themselves. When the men stood still for thirty minutes, the blood ran to their feet.
A few years from now and we’ll be dead, he thought, looking at tan frail Jamie and nutty old Mr. Vaught, and they, the women, will be back here looking at “places.”
The moonlight curled along the wavelets. She put her hand in his and squeezed it. He squeezed back. They sat against a log. She took her hand away and began sifting sand; it was cool and dry and left not a grain on the skin.
“How do you feel? Do you still love me?” “Yes.” “Do you? Oh, I love you too.” Why did this not sound right, here on Folly Beach in old Carolina in the moonlight?
I shall court her henceforth in the old style. I shall press her hand. No more grubby epithelial embraces in dogbane thickets, followed by accusing phone calls. Never again! Not until we are in our honeymoon cottage in a cottage small by a waterfall.
“Nothing,” he said, kissing her tenderly and cursing himself. His heart sank. Was it not that she was right and that he made too much of it? What it was, though, was that this was the last thing he expected. It was part of his expectations of the life which lay before him that girls would be girls just as camellias were camellias. If he loved a girl and walked with her on Folly Beach by moonlight, kissed her sweet lips and held her charms in his arms, it should follow that he would be simply he and she she, she as complete as a camellia with her corolla of reticences and allurements. But she,
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The two youths had dawdled as usual and it was almost midnight when the Trav-L-Aire came groaning up the hill, bucket swinging under her like a Conestoga wagon, and crept into a pine grove bursting with gouts of amber rosin still fragrant from the hot afternoon.
It had come over him again, the old itch for omniscience. One day it was longing for carnal knowledge, the next for perfect angelic knowledge. Tonight he was not American and horny but English and eavesdropper. He had to know without being known.
“I want to go to school. I want to buy new textbooks and a binder full of fresh paper and hold my books in my arms and walk across the campus. And wear a sweater.” “Very well.”
A hundred servants waited on them, so black and respectful, so absolutely amiable and well-disposed that it was possible to believe that they really were. One or two of them were by way of being characters and allowed themselves to get on a footing with you.
Kitty saw him and wanted to go to the camper with him. He saw that she was exhilarated by the storm, and since she was, he was not.
No more for him the old upside-down Manhattan monkey business of rejoicing in airplane crashes and staggering around museums half out of his head and falling upon girls in hurricanes.
Henceforth, he resolved, he would do right, feel good when good was called for, bad when bad. He aimed to take Kitty to a proper d...
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Once they were outside in the storm, however, he felt better despite himself, though he had sworn not to feel good in bad environments.
He laughed dolefully and would have but at that moment, in the storm’s lull, a knock rattled the louvers of the rear door.
The happiness and serenity of the South disconcerted him. He had felt good in the North because everyone else felt so bad. True, there was a happiness in the North. That is to say, nearly everyone would have denied that he was unhappy. And certainly the North was victorious. It had never lost a war. But Northerners had turned morose in their victory. They were solitary and shut-off to themselves
He was determined to be as happy as anyone, even though his happiness before had come from Northern unhappiness. If folks down here are happy and at home, he told himself, then I shall be happy and at home too.
What was wrong with a Mr. and Mrs. Williston Bibb Barrett living in a brand-new house in a brand-new suburb with a proper address: 2041 Country Club Drive, Druid Hills, Atlanta, Georgia? Nothing was wrong, but he got worse anyway. The happiness of the South drove him wild with despair.
The engineer’s amnesia was now of this order: he forgot things he had seen before, but things he had heard of and not seen looked familiar. Old new things like fifty-year-old golf links where Bobby Jones played once were haunted by memory.
A handsome woman with strong white arms and a cloud of heavy brown hair, she reminded the engineer of the Business and Professional Women he had seen turning out for luncheons at Holiday Inns from Charleston to Chattanooga.
Everybody was wonderful and thought everybody else was. More than once he overheard one girl tell another: “She’s the most wonderful girl I ever knew!”
There was a step behind him and presently voices. He cracked an eyelid. The song sparrow was scratching, kicking leaves and looking around like a chicken. Fireballs danced on his lashes, broke into bows and sheaves of color.
“Everyone thinks very highly of you—though for strangely diverse, even contradictory reasons. I can’t help noticing. You are evidently quite a fellow.
Do you think it is possible to come to Christ through ordinary dislike before discovering the love of Christ? Can dislike be a sign?” “I couldn’t say,” said the sleepy engineer.
Sutter shrugged. “You know. He is—” His free hand, held forth like a blade, moved back and forth across the vertical. “Yes,” said Val. “—nice,” ended Sutter with six overtones in his voice, “you know.”
