Walker Percy

Today we mark the birth of Walker Percy (1916–1990). Born in Birmingham, Percy remained in the South throughout the course of his life (save a short stint in New York City, where he attended medical school at Columbia University).

The eldest of three sons, Percy was orphaned after both of his parents committed suicide within a span of two years. Raised with his brothers by his bachelor cousin (a lawyer and poet), Walker was brought up as an agnostic but converted to Catholicism as an adult, alongside his wife and children.

Percy met Shelby Foote—a neighbor boy down the road—when he was fifteen, and the two remained lifelong fraternal and literary friends, deeply influencing each others' work. Percy credits tuberculosis for introducing him to Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, whom he read during his long convalescence and who ultimately influenced him to "explore the dislocation of man in the modern age." He also said: "[Tuberculosis was] the best disease I ever had. If I hadn't had it, I might be a second-rate shrink practicing in Birmingham, at best." 

Percy won the National Book Award for his (probably most famous) novel, The Moviegoer, but his essays are also wonderful. Click the links below to see what we currently have in stock.

from Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book:

It's one thing to develop a nostalgia for home while you're boozing with Yankee writers in Martha's Vineyard or being chased by the bulls in Pamplona. It's something else to go home and visit with the folks in Reed's drugstore on the square and actually listen to them. The reason you can't go home again is not because the down-home folks are mad at you—they're not, don't flatter yourself, they couldn't care less—but because once you're in orbit and you return to Reed's drugstore on the square, you can stand no more than fifteen minutes of the conversation before you head for the woods, head for the liquor store, or head back to Martha's Vineyard, where at least you can put a tolerable and saving distance between you and home. Home may be where the heart is but it's no place to spend Wednesday afternoon. 

from The Moviegoer:

Hatred strikes me as one of the few signs of life remaining in the world. This is another thing about the world which is upsidedown: all the friendly and likable people seem dead to me; only the haters seem alive.

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book 

Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World

Message in a Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

The Moviegoer

Signposts in a Strange Land: Essays

The Thanatos Syndrome: A Novel

The Father of Existentialism

'Tis the birthday of the "father of existentialism," Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, who said: "It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey."

Called by some "an outsider in the history of philosophy," Kierkegaard baffles categorization. His work includes aesthetic novels, psychology, Christian dogmatics, satire, philosophical "scraps" and "postscripts," literary reviews, edifying discourses, Christian polemics, and self-interpretations—though he considered himself, first and foremost, a religious poet.

Kierkegaard inherited melancholy (at least in part) from his father, who figures prominently throughout his work (in stories of sacrifice, as the archetypal patriarch, and in several dedications), while his mother is never mentioned. Many critics conjoin this fact with a remark Kierkegaard makes in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, that "an omnipresent person should be recognizable precisely by being invisible," speculating that his mother is, in reality, ever-present.

Rhetorically, Kierkegaard used irony, satire, parody, humor, and what he calls "indirect communication" as a way to help the reader engage with existential ideas. Regarding his idea of indirect communication, he writes (in Concluding Unscientific Postscript):

No anonymous author can more slyly hide himself, and no maieutic can more carefully recede from a direct relation than God can. He is in the creation, everywhere in the creation, but he is not there directly, and only when the single individual turns inward into himself (consequently only in the inwardness of self-actvity) does he become aware and capable of seeing God.

Though it took some time and effort, he eventually became a master of his mother tongue (Danish) and was rivaled only by his contemporary, Hans Christian Andersen.

O—did we mention the man was rather religious about walking?

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.

On to the books…

Either/Or, Part 1 (Kierkegaard's Writings)

For Self-Examination / Judge for Yourselves! (Kierkegaard's Writings)

Gospel of Sufferings

A Literary Review

The Point of View (Kierkegaard's Writings)

Practice in Christianity (Kierkegaard's Writings)

Prefaces / Writing Sampler

Purity of Heart