The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming

by Walker Percy

Not once in his entire life had he allowed himself to come to rest in the quiet center of himself but had forever cast himself forward from some dark past he could not remember to a future which did not exist. Not once had he been present for his life. So his life had passed like a dream.

It became clear why Presidents like to go to funerals. The worse things got for Lyndon Johnson, the more funerals he went to, there he stood grave and silent, dispensed.

Yet when you took a good look at him, this sweaty Episcopal handyman, this godly greasy super, you saw in an instant that he was not quite there. Looking at him was like trying to focus on a blurred photograph.

God, love, faith, marriage. The old words clanged softly in the golden air around them like the Westminister chimes of St. John’s steeple clock.

Did you know that the hundred twenty-first psalm was Marion’s favorite? I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. And you better believe that’s where hers came from.”

Tod nodded, had not stopped nodding. He gazed down at Tannie’s little stick arms. The skin was white and paper dry but a vein, thick and powerful as a snake, coiled on her wrist.

Like many rich women, she loved a bargain. All the while he gazed in bemusement at the ragged Southern cemetery, empty except for the Rolls, the hearse, Yamaiuchi, and three Asheville morticians (he was usually the fourth pallbearer for the casket light with its wispy burden), and then gazed around the bustling new Holiday Inn and the local businessmen come to eat. Live men and dead men.

How does it happen that a man can go through his life standing up, not himself and dreaming, eating business lunches and passing his wife in the hall, that it is only when he lies bleeding in a swamp that he becomes as solid and simple as the shotgun beside him?

Like many people who want something, he had a way of coming at you from the side and grinning back to his eyeteeth.

Is there another way? People either believe everything or they believe nothing. People like the Christians or Californians believe anything, everything. People like you and Lewis Peckham and the professors and scientists believe nothing. Is there another way?

You loved only death because for you what passed for life was really a death-in-life, which has no name and so is worse than death.

He could handle that, but suppose one is made the butt of a joke and doesn’t get the joke? He wished Will Barrett, who seldom smiled, would stop smiling.

My people? Yes, they were Episcopalians but at heart they were members of the Augusta Legion and in the end at home not at St. John o’ the Woods but with the bleached bones of Centurion Marcus Flavinius on the desert of the old Empire. They were the Romans, the English, Angles, Saxons, Jutes—citizens of Rome in the old Empire.

There is a time to talk religion with women, to be God’s plumber, to have solemn yet joyous bull sessions with men during a weekend with God, to horse around at a party. He was at home doing any of these but not when they were mixed up.

When you leave a house for the last time and take one last look around before closing the door, it is as if you were seeing the house again for the first time. What happened to the five thousand times between?

“Where we came from, if you fell out with somebody, you didn’t smile at them and go around behind their backs. You called them out and had it out with them.”

That’s right. We call ourselves out and have it out with ourselves. Famous one-man shoot-outs.

Though he tried to listen to the joke, his mind wandered. Jimmy pulled him close and then gave him a final little tug. The joke must be over. “I have to go,” he said.

Ah well. Yes. That’s it. Maybe there had been a time when there was something to say and maybe the time would come again, but it was not now. “What?” said Leslie. “Goodbye,” he said.

And what samurai self-love of death, let alone the little death of everyday fuck-you love, can match the double Winchester come of taking oneself into oneself, the cold-steel extension of oneself into mouth, yes, for you, for me, for us, the logical and ultimate act of fuck-you love fuck-off world, the penetration and union of perfect cold gunmetal into warm quailing mortal flesh, the coming to end all coming, brain cells which together faltered and fell short, now flowered and flew apart, flung like stars around the whole dark world.

He thought he was a good poet but he was not. He thought books could tell him how to live but they couldn’t. He was a serious but dazed reader.

Why was Lewis’s unbelief so unpleasant? It was no better than the Baptists’ belief. If belief is shitty and unbelief is shitty, what does that leave?

Why was it that the thought of the finer things in life, such as the Ninth Symphony, made his heart sink like a stone? For a fact, the Ninth Symphony was one of the finer things. On the other hand, Lewis’s proposal was so demented he had to laugh: he and this solemn poet-golf-pro music lover listening to the Ode to Joy of an afternoon in old Carolina.

Was this not madness pure and simple, to come from Tidewater Virginia, read about Dante and God, read the terza rima aloud with such admiration that tears came to his eyes—and top it off with Erich Fromm?

for the very outlandishness of it, taking for his own a New York Episcopal view of an Anglican view of a Roman view of a Jewish Happening. Might it not be true for this very reason?

She truly gave herself to others, served God and her fellow man with a good and cheerful heart—and ate and ate and ate, her eyes as round and glittering as a lover’s.

A tiny stone lodged in her common bile duct. A bacillus sprouted in the stagnant dammed bile. She turned yellow as butter and hot as fire. There was no finding the diamond through the cliffs of ocherous fat. She died.

He could not disagree with them nor allow himself the slightest distance of irony. How could he disagree with them? Both seemed to be right or at least triumphantly well-intentioned. It was odd only that though he had no quarrel with them, they quarreled with each other.

Kitty believed in astrology. Yamaiuchi was a Jehovah’s Witness. He believed he was one of the 144,000 who would survive Armageddon and actually live in their bodies on this earth for a thousand years—and reign.

Ordinarily one does not keep track and does not imagine that there will be a last lining up. But why not decide which lining up will be the last? Very well. This one.

“What?” he said and gave a start. Kitty seemed to be talking about her daughter. “Schizophrenics often are.” “Are what?” “Shrewd.

Kitty’s hand, he noticed, was on his arm. He gave a start. He had not been listening. “Don’t forget,” whispered Kitty in his ear but not quite managing to whisper. “What?” “Three o’clock.” “Okay,” he said absently.

Kitty wanted what? him? his money? out from the dentist? He wanted what? Kitty’s ass? Death? Both?

But no one answered. Everyone seemed sunk in thought. Only Mr. Arnold tried to say something but his lip blew out. He pointed a finger straight into his mouth. Across the room Yamaiuchi was leaving fast with a tray of empty bloody-Mary glasses. Will Barrett called to him and made a motion. It was possible for Yamaiuchi, whose eye had not quite met his, to pretend he hadn’t heard him.

Entering her, he would be answered, responded to, delineated. His life would be proved by her. She would echo him, print him out, trace his shape like radar. He could read himself in her.

In his strange new mood he made the following observation: people notice very little indeed, ghost-ridden as they are by themselves. You have to be bleeding from the mouth or throwing a fit for them to take notice. Otherwise, anything you do is no more or less than another part of the world they have to deal with, poor souls.

Warning signs

The white cloud which filled the wide doorway had grown as dense and solid as a pearl. No doubt the sun shone directly upon it, for it was shot through with delicate colors.

Again the ripple of darkness came forward at the corner of his eye but it went away when he tried to look at it. Instead, he looked at the three cars.

But for a fact he may well have had one of his spells, for when he looked up, Ewell McBee had vanished without a trace. Swallowed up by the thick opalescent cloud.

I will not waste mine, he thought, smiling.

Take Christians. I am surrounded by Christians. They are generally speaking a pleasant and agreeable lot, not noticeably different from other people—even though they, the Christians of the South, the U.S.A., the Western world have killed off more people in recent centuries than all other people put together.

But I’ve always been suspicious of the word “love,” what with its gross abuse and overuse. There is no cheaper word. I can’t say tell her I “love” her, because I don’t really know what “love” means except as it applies to one’s feeling for children—and then it may only mean one’s sense of responsibility for their terrible vulnerability, which they never asked for. One loves children, especially one’s own, because there they are, through no doing of their own, born into the same low farce you and I are living but not knowing it yet, being in fact as happy as doodlebugs and you and I would do anything to keep them so.

Madness! Madness! Madness! Yet such was the nature of Will Barrett’s peculiar delusion when he left his comfortable home atop a pleasant Carolina mountain and set forth on the strangest adventure of his life, descended into Lost Cove cave looking for proof of the existence of God and a sign of the apocalypse like some crackpot preacher in California.

There is one sure cure for cosmic explorations, grandiose ideas about God, man, death, suicide, and such—and that is nausea. I defy a man afflicted with nausea to give a single thought to these vast subjects. A nauseated man is a sober man. A nauseated man is a disinterested man. What does a nauseated person care about the Last Days?

But perhaps it was only one of the little explosions of light and color which now and then lit up the fragments of road map, bits of highway, crossroad, dots of towns which drifted across his retina. In the gray watery world, anyhow, no one seemed to notice the tiger. Very well, he thought, neither shall I.

The joke was that for the first time in the history of the universe it was the man who knew who he was, who was as snug as a bug in his rock cocoon, and the beast who did not, who was fretful, unsure of himself and the future, unsure what he was doing here.

It is astonishing how such a simple and commonplace ailment as pain and nausea can knock everything else out of one’s head, lofty thoughts, profound thoughts, crazy thoughts, even lust.

A cave is like a river. It is hard to get lost going down. Going up is something else.

Pains shot up his neck. Very well. He had broken his neck. He opened his mouth and she poured water into it. There are few joys greater than drinking cool water after a serious thirst.

His long slack muscles were like straps on iron. When she lifted part of his body, the rest clove to the earth as if it had taken root.