Oh, I didn't mean to say Tom was a careerist. Your points on his "dark
night" are well-taken, and I cannot disagree with you.
I suppose I see a lot of Walker Percy in Tom--he once said if he hadn't
got TB he would've ended up a 2d rate psychiatrist (we should've all
been so lucky to recline on his couch). Tom is a man of science.
Enamored of the sci method and all that. For whatever reason he
abandoned his faith at one time. Now, with LitR and later in TS, he is
slowly coming back. In his heart, he believes Fr Smith, but there's
still an old scientific skeptical side of him that resists. All of
Percy's protagonists, it seems to me, are kind of caught between
worlds, choices, ways to live. They're not fully sunk in
everydayness--obviously not; they're all onto searches--, they're not
stoics, they find their scientific buddies lacking something. They
turn to religion, and in the South they run into fundamentalists who
are obfuscating God's message, evacuating it of meaning. Yet these
protagonists--except for Lance, of course--like all their fellows. In
these protagonists there exists the potential for real
intersubjectivity, for true unification (not of the moonie sort).
WEll, I've gotten far afield from Fr Smith, but to repeat, no, you're
right, Tom is not a careerist, not since the business with the
lapsometer. And he's still in the process of coming home to his
Catholic roots.
Our library has Hardy'sbook. I promise to get to it this summer. For
now, I'm immured in my Latin American Writers class. But that's okay.
I don't really know what my prof is going to think when I cite 3 or 4
MITB essays for my seminar paper on Alejo Carpentier's _The Lost
Steps_.
Ken