Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Walker Percy
Read between
September 20, 2018 - May 1, 2020
The sentient engineer perceived immediately that the recliner he was given was Merriam’s seat, but there was nothing he could do about it. Uncle Fannin pretended the recliner had been brought out for the engineer (how could it have been?) and Merriam pretended he always roosted high in the darkness.
Hotel room = site of intersection of transcendence and immanence: room itself, a triaxial coordinate ten floors above street; whore who comes up = pure immanence to be entered. But entry doesn’t avail: one skids off into transcendance. There is no reentry from the orbit of transcendence.
She fell in love with me because I needed her, and then with Kitty because she thought I didn’t need her and because Kitty seemed to, with that Gretel-lost-in-the-woods look of hers.
“I wish you were here with me.” “Me too.” All of a sudden he did. Love pangs entered his heart and melted his loin and his life seemed simple. The thing to do—why couldn’t he remember it?—was to marry Kitty and get a job and live an ordinary life, play golf like other people. “We will be married.”
Let us say you were right: that man is a wayfarer (i.e., not transcending being nor immanent being but wayfarer) who therefore stands in the way of hearing a piece of news which is of the utmost importance to him (i.e., his salvation) and which he had better attend to.
Look, Barrett, your trouble is due not to a disorder of your organism but to the human condition, that you do well to be afraid and you do well to forget everything which does not pertain to your salvation.
But he will receive the news from his high seat of transcendence as one more item of psychology, throw it into his immanent meat-grinder, and wait to see if he feels better. He told me he’s in favor of the World’s Great Religions. What are you going to do about that?
He sat down under the cistern and sniffed a handful of soil. The silence was disjunct. It ran concurrently with one and did not flow from the past.
Each passing second was packaged in cottony silence. It had no antecedents. Here was three o’clock but it was not like three o’clock in Mississippi. In Mississippi it is always Wednesday afternoon, or perhaps Thursday. The country there is peopled, a handful of soil strikes a pang to the heart, dêjà vus fly up like a shower of sparks. Even in the Southern wilderness there is ever the sense of someone close by, watching from the woods. Here one was not watched. There was no one.
He frowned, feeling suddenly put off and out of sorts. This was not what he was looking for and did him no good at all.
Outside he sat in the cab of the Trav-L-Aire and waited. The Sangre de Cristo range began to turn red. At five o’clock a breeze sprang up. The windmill creaked and presently little yellow flycatchers began to fly down from the mountain and line up on the rim of the cistern.
Dark fell suddenly and the stars came out. They drew in and in half an hour hung as large and low as yellow lamps at a garden party.
He shivered. I’m through with telescopes, he thought, and the vasty galaxies. What do I need with Andromeda? What I need is my ’Bama bride and my cozy camper, a match struck and the butane lit and a friendly square of light cast upon the neighbor earth, and a hot cup of Luzianne between us against the desert cold, and a warm bed and there lie dreaming in one another’s arms while old Andromeda leans through the night.
The visitor brought a deck of cards and they played gin in the cheerful yellow sunlight. Death seemed out of the question. How can anyone play a six of clubs one minute and die the next?
For the first time the engineer understood how men can spend a week playing poker, women a lifetime at bridge. The game was the thing. One became impatient with non-game happenings—a nurse coming in to empty the urinal. Time disposed itself in short tolerable stretches between the bright beads of the games. The score itself, toted up and announced, had the cheerful workaday effect of a small tidy business.
“No, I tell you what you do,” said Sutter, drawing him close in an odd little bantering confidence. “Call Rita.” “Rita,” repeated the puzzled engineer.
Give her a hard time about the book. She promised to send it to me. Tell her I think she lost heart in the argument. She claims there is a historical movement in the direction of negative entrophy. But so what? You know.”
Then he perceived that the youth was out of his head and was hearing words according to some fashion of his own. “I will.”
“Fine.” The patient smiled his best smile because he wanted the visitor to leave. The book was the safest sunniest most inviolate circle of all.
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.
I spoke in her ear and invited her to her room. Afterwards very low. Went to ranch, shot myself, missed brain, carried away cheek.
I saw something clearly while I had no cheek and grinned like a skeleton. But I got well and forgot what it was. I won’t miss next time.
Yet now when he rushed out into the abstract afternoon to find a maid (but who?) he forgot again and instead found himself picking through the ashes of the trashburner. What was that last sentence? It had a bearing. But the notebook was destroyed.
Perhaps if he could talk to a certain someone he would stop hankering for anyone and everyone, and tender feelings of love would take the place of this great butting billygoat surge which was coming over him again.
Did you ever read the great philosopher Wittgenstein?” “No sir,” said the other gloomily. “After his last work he announced the dictum which summarized his philosophy. He said: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one should keep silent. And he did. He stopped teaching and went to live in a hut and said no more.”
There she sits in the woods as if the world had ended and she was one of the Elected Ones Left to keep the Thing going, but the world has not ended, in fact is more the same than usual. We are in the same fix, she and I, only I know it and she doesn’t.
You know something, Barrett? There’s one thing I’ve never been able to get the straight of, and that is what it is you want of me. I suspect it is one of two things. You either want me to tell you to fornicate or not to fornicate, but for the life of me I can’t tell which it is.”
“Better to love and be loved.” “Absolutely.” "To cultivate whatever talents one has.” “Correct.” “To make a contribution, however small.” “However small.” “To do one’s best to promote tolerance and understanding between the races, surely the most pressing need before the country.” “Beyond question the most pressing need. Tolerance and understanding. Yes.” The engineer flushed. “Well, isn’t it better?” “Yes.” “Violence is bad.” “Violence is not good.” “It is better to make love to one’s wife than to monkey around with a lot of women.” “A lot better.” “I am sure I am right.” “You are right.”
The engineer gazed gloomily at the chuck wagon, a large red dining cottage across the quadrangle. Cookie, a Chinese with a black cap and a queue, came out and seizing the branding iron rang it around the iron triangle.
No doubt, as you suggested, a good part of my nervous condition stems from this abnormal relationship—or lack of relationship—” “As I suggested? I never suggested any such goddamn thing.” “At any rate,” the engineer went on hurriedly, looking down at the other, “I think I see for the first time the possibility of a happy, useful life.” “Good. So?” “Dr. Vaught, why was that man screaming?” “What man?” “The man you told me about—the Deke from Vanderbilt—with the lovely wife and children—you know.” “Oh, Scotty. Christ, Barrett, for somebody with fugues, you’ve got quite a memory.” “Yes sir.”
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The old civil sorrowful air of the East still clung to her; she walked as if she still wore a dress. Though she had hooked her thumbs into her pockets, she had not yet got into the way of making herself free of herself and of swinging her legs like a man.
There was about her the wryness and ruefulness of a twenty-eight-year-old who has been staggered by a not quite mortal blow and has her own woman’s way of getting over it and in fact has already done so. She knew how to muse along a path and hiss a little tune and keep herself to herself.
“If I do outlive Jamie,” said Sutter, putting on his Curlee jacket (double breasted!), “it will not be by more than two hours. What in Christ’s name do you think I’m doing out here? Do you think I’m staying? Do you think I’m going back?” The engineer opened his mouth but said nothing. For the first time in his life he was astonished. “You won’t join me, Barrett?” “What? No. No, thanks.”
Perhaps this moment more than any other, the moment of his first astonishment, marked the beginning for the engineer of what is called a normal life. From that time forward it was possible to meet him and after a few minutes form a clear notion of what sort of fellow he was and how he would spend the rest of his life.
The ancient Alabama silence fried away in his ear. His foot went to sleep. Twice he had to stoke the box with quarters. That black cretin Axel— “Hello.” He gave a start. He had almost forgotten where he was. “Hello, is this Val? That is, Sister—” “This is Val.” “Val, this is—” Christ, who? “—Will Barrett.”
“Barrett, look. I know that you are a highly intelligent and an intuitive man, and that you have a gift for fathoming people. Isn’t that true?” “I don’t know,” he said glumly. “I think you can tell when somebody is deadly serious about something, can’t you?” “I couldn’t say.” “Then I am charging you with the responsibility. You will have to fathom that according to your own lights.” “You can’t—” But the circuits had closed on unhappy old Alabama, frying away in its own juices.
Yet her glossy eyes were on him, round as a dollar watch, the lids nictitating from below like a lizard’s. Her smile, stretching open the rugae, the troughs of which he noticed were bare of lipstick, proffered a new ghastly friendship for him.
She knew him! Perhaps she had known him all along. On the other hand, there seemed to have sprung up between them a brand-new friendship, a species of roguish fondness. Again segments of time collapsed, fell away, and he was transported magically into the corridor, she at his side, squeezing his arm in a love-joke. Doors flew open. Elevators converged on the floor.
His hand, which he gave the engineer in a tentative interrogatory clasp (what sort of a bird are you, asked the hand), was thick through the palm and heavily freckled.
“If you mean Roman Catholic, no. I’m an Episcopalian,” said the engineer stiffly. Where in the world did these ready-made polemics come from? Never in his entire lifetime had he given such matters a single thought and now all at once he was a stout Anglican, a defender of the faith.
“No sir. His background was originally Baptist, though his family later became Episcopalian—which accounts for the delay.” The engineer, who could not quite remember the explanation, fell silent. “Delay in baptism, that is,” he added after a moment. The priest examined another blister on the water pipe. “I don’t quite see why I have been summoned,” he said softly. “Perhaps you’d better call the Protestant chaplain.”
for one thing, he liked it that the other didn’t intone in a religious voice. He was more like a baseball umpire in his serviceable serge, which was swelled out by his muscular body.
The priest took off his glasses, exposing naked eyes and a naked nosebridge, and carefully polished the lenses with a clean handkerchief.
“Yes sir.” Unhinged as he was, the engineer was still sentient. He perceived that the priest had a certain style of talking which he no doubt shared with other priests. It was a good bet that quite a few priests liked to say such things as “It is a ‘must’” or perhaps “Now that is the sixty-four-dollar question.”
Later Sutter told the engineer that, contrary to popular notions, dying men often carry out complex actions in the last moments of life. One patient he recalled who was dying of tuberculosis had climbed out of bed, washed his pajamas in the sink, hung them out to dry, returned to the bed, pulled the covers up to his chin to hide his nakedness, and died.
The engineer moved a step closer, cocking his good ear but keeping his arms folded as the sign of his discretion.
Jamie’s eyes were fixed on the engineer, but the irony was shot through with the first glint of delirium. He nodded to the engineer. The engineer sighed and, feeling freer, looked up. Sutter hung fire, his chin on his knuckles, his eyes half-closed and gleaming like a Buddha’s.
The engineer went to get the bedpan. Jamie tried to lift his head. “No no,” said Sutter impatiently, and coming quickly across simply bound the dying youth to the bed by folding the counterpane into a strap and pressing it against his chest. “Get on with it, Father,” he said angrily. The priest took the plastic glass. “I baptize you in the name of the Father—” He poured a trickle of water into the peninsula of fried dusty hair. “And of the Son—” He poured a little more. “And of the Holy Ghost.” He poured the rest. The three men watched as the water ran down the youth’s bruised forehead.
The priest bent lower still, storekeeper over his counter, and took the narrow waxy hand between his big ruddy American League paws. “Son,” he said in the same flat mercantile voice, looking first at the brown stain on the wall and then down at the dying youth.
“I won’t let you go,” the priest said. As he waited he curled his lip absently against his teeth in a workaday five-o’clock-in-the-afternoon expression. After several minutes Sutter let go the sheet which he still held as a strap across Jamie.
