The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

“All right, Father,” said Sutter in an irritable voice when the priest didn’t move. “On the way out, would you send in the nurse and the resident?” “What?” said the priest, bracketing his glasses with his free hand. “Oh, yes. Certainly.” He started for the washstand, thought better of it, turned and left the room.

He wondered if one was expected to “make an offering,” but he had no notion of how to hand money over except to hand it over. He contented himself with wringing the priest’s hand warmly and thanking him twice.

“What happened back there?” “In the hospital room? You were there.” “I know, but what did you think? I could tell you were thinking something.” “Do you have to know what I think before you know what you think?”

Strength flowed like oil into his muscles and he ran with great joyous ten-foot antelope bounds. The Edsel waited for him.

For some time he had been feeling depressed without knowing why. In fact, he didn’t even realize he was depressed. Rather was it the world and life around him which seemed to grow more senseless and farcical with each passing day.

Lying there, cheek pressed against the earth, he noticed that things looked different from this unaccustomed position. A strange bird flew past. A cumulus cloud went towering thousands of feet into the air. Ordinarily he would not have given the cloud a second glance.

He heard something and the sound reminded him of an event that had happened a long time ago. It was the most important event in his life, yet he had managed until that moment to forget it. Shortly afterwards, he became even more depressed.

It astonished him that as farcical as most people’s lives were, they generally gave no sign of it.

Ethel, let’s me and you homestead this leftover land here and now, this non-place, this surveyor’s interstice. Here’s the place for us, the only place not Jew or Gentile, not black or white, not public or private. Later a doctor raised the possibility of a small hemorrhage or arterial spasm near the brain’s limbic system, seat of all desire, a location which would account for the sexual component of his disorder.

Surely, though, all is not well with a man who falls down in the fairway, and finds himself overtaken by unaccountable memories, memories of extraordinary power and poignancy. But memories of what? Of the most insignificant events and places imaginable, of a patch of weeds in Mississippi, of a missing tile in a gloomy New York subway station, of a girl whom he had not thought of since leaving high school!

the Christian Church, Church of Christ, Church of God, Church of God in Christ, Church of Christ in God, Assembly of God, Bethel Baptist Church, Independent Presbyterian Church, United Methodist Church, and Immaculate Heart of Mary Roman Catholic Church.

He lived in the most Christian nation in the world, the U.S.A., in the most Christian part of that nation, the South, in the most Christian state in the South, North Carolina, in the most Christian town in North Carolina.

He slowed, turned on the radio, and tried to tune in a nonreligious program. He could not find one.

Yes, that was it. With two mirrors it is possible to see oneself briefly as a man among men rather than a self sucking everything into itself—

Firing the Luger, he discovered, helped knock him out of his “spells.” But it did not work as well as before.

There at any rate stands Will Barrett on the edge of a gorge in old Carolina, a talented agreeable wealthy man living in as pleasant an environment as one can imagine and yet who is thinking of putting a bullet in his brain.

All too often these days they were two percent themselves, specters who hardly occupied a place at all. How can the great suck of self ever hope to be a fat cat dozing in the sun?

The cat of course had jumped four feet straight up and fled in terror, as any sensible animal would, reduced instantly to zero percentile of its well-being. But Barrett? The missing ninety-eight percent is magically restored! How? By the rifle shot!

How does it happen that this is what I do best and feel best doing, not hitting a three-wood on a green fairway but rolling away from gunfire and into a safe corner where I can look out without being seen and where I can’t be enfiladed?—all with a secret coolness and even taking a satisfaction in it. This is better than—than what?

Strange to say, that made matters worse, to have to listen to Ewell apologize for shooting up his house. If there is an enemy, it is better to know who he is.

If there is no enemy, then I am either mad or living in a madhouse. Peace is only better than war if peace is not hell too. War being hell makes sense.

Could one “save a place” on a public bench? She couldn’t remember. Soon it was possible for her to observe people as well as clothes.

she began to notice that there were two kinds of people. There were those who had plans, whose eyes and movements were aimed toward a future, and those who did not. Some youngish people, that is, between twenty and thirty-five, sat on the sidewalk in silence. Though they sat or lay in relaxed positions, time did not seem to pass easily for them. They looked as if they had gone to great lengths to deal with the problem of time and had not succeeded. They were waiting.

It became possible, she noticed, to look at things rather than watch out for things. A line of ants crawled past her foot.

While he was talking, she was planning a declarative sentence. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she said, uttering one word after another. The sentence sounded flat but she finished it and her voice did not go up into a question.

The sun was high. She felt warm and drowsy. Perhaps it was noon. For some time, perhaps five minutes, perhaps twenty minutes, she had been watching the column of ants. They traveled past the toe of her boot. Most but not all carried cutout pieces of green leaves. They followed the same path, climbing over the same granules of concrete, then descending into a crack at the same place, then climbing out of the crack at the same place.

It took me (you? us?) all my life to make the discovery. Why so long? And then I (you, we) had to go crazy to do it. Why was the discovery so difficult? Because it is the very nature of the thing to be discovered and the very nature of the seeking that it could not be found by asking somebody or by reading a book.

Imagine being born with gold-tinted corneas and undertaking a lifelong search for gold. You’d never find it.

“What’s that?” he said, putting his great hairy ear close to her mouth. She had asked her question too soon and in too much of a rush. Yet before she could repeat it, it seemed to her that he was backtracking and listening to her first question again.

His fingernail was as large and convex as a watch crystal and, surprisingly, polished. The nail made a slight sound on the paper as it passed up and down the trails. As their heads bent close over the map, she could not hear him breathe in but his exhalations came out whistling and strong as a bellows. The sight of his large polished nail on the map and the sound of his breathing so diverted her that she could not collect her thoughts.

Sensitivity

Unlike sin in life, retribution is instantaneous. The ball, one’s very self launched into its little life, gives offense from the very outset, is judged, condemned, and sent screaming away and, banished from the pleasant licit fairways and the sunny irenic greens, goes wrong and ever wronger, past the rough, past even the barbed-wire fence, and into the dark fens and thickets and briars of out-of-bounds.

Lewis Peckham did not offer to help him find his ball. He knew why.

It was a nice calculation. Your ordinary pro would make a great sweaty show of helping out.

There was nothing but the sound of the silence, the seashell roar which could be the eeing and ohing of his own blood or the sound of cicadas at the end of summer which seems to come both from the pines and from inside one’s head.

The golf carts were going away. They had crossed a rise in the fairway. Through the trees he could see their white canopies move, one behind the other, as silently as sails.

But he had not forgotten anything. Today for some reason he remembered everything. Everything he saw became a sign of something else. This fence was a sign of another fence he had climbed through. The hawk was a sign of another hawk and of a time when he believed there were fabulous birds. The tiger? Whatever he was, he was gone.

There is no mystery. The only mystery is that nothing changes. Nothing really happens. Marriages, births, deaths, terrible wars had occurred but had changed nothing. War is not a change but a poor attempt to make a change. War and peace are not events.

Depression

It was the funky tannin rot of the pin-oak swamp as sharp in his nostrils as wood smoke.

The birds angled apart and the man and the boy, following them, diverged. A lopsided scrub oak, dead leaves brown and heavy as leather, came between them. A ground fog filled the hollows like milk.

As the boy moved ahead silently on the wet speckled leaves, his heart did not beat in his throat as it used to before quail are flushed.

Through the leathery leaves and against the milkiness he caught sight of a swatch of khaki.

Didn’t he hear it again, the so sudden uproar of stiff wings beating the little drum of bird body and the man swinging toward him in the terrific concentration of keeping gunsight locked on the fat tilt-winged quail and hard upon the little drumbeat the shocking blast rolling away like thunder through the silent woods?

The boy saw the muzzle burst and flame spurting from the gun like a picture of a Civil War soldier shooting and even had time to wonder why he had never seen it before, before he heard the whistling and banging in his ear and found himself down in the leaves without knowing how he got there and even then could still hear the sound of the number-eight shot rattling away through the milky swamp and was already scrambling to get up from the embarrassment of it (for that was no place to be), but when he tried to stand, the keening in his ear spun him down ag...

Twelve years old, he grew up in ten minutes. It was possible for him to stretch out a hand to the tree and touch it, not hold it.

All you need to do anything is time to do it, being let alone long enough to do it and a center to do it from. He had found his center.

fond shouting style. You could have both been killed! So it had come to pass that there were two accounts of what had happened, and if one was false the other must be true;

The boy almost came to believe her, especially when she praised him.

But it was not bravery, he thought, eyes narrowing, almost smiling. It was the coldness, the hard secret core of himself that he had found.

Was he trying to tell me because he draught that if I knew exactly what happened to him and what was going to happen to me, that by the mere telling it would not then have to happen to me?

If you don’t know about it, it will certainly happen to you. But if you know, will it not happen anyway?