Dark Night

A.E. Manier Sr. (A.E.Manier.1@ND.EDU)
Wed, 2 Apr 1997 14:02:19 -0500

Fyodor has other papers to write and I don't want to badger or tempt
someone who cares about my question, but....

Isn't the issue just how much of Walker Percy is in Tom More? Tom
More, M.D., a sometime Catholic, is a psychiatrist with a background in
molecular neuroscience (heavy sodium, the lapsometer) and the Harry Stack
Sullivan approach to inter- personal psychoanalysis. Presumably he
hasn't dabbled in, or plumbed the depths of, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, C. S.
Peirce or Gabriel Marcel, or have I missed something?

How should we understand his religious infidelity? an experientially
motivated crisis of faith? a passing fugue? subclinical dysthymia of
the sort often self-medicated with alcohol and a hyperactive fantasy
life?

When Tom gets out of the minimum security slammer, the dysthymia has
lifted. Outdoor work is good for that. What about the crisis of
faith? Did that have cognitive content? roots in habits of the heart?
is it an articulable crisis? Can anyone say anything about it?

Someone builds his house on a firetower and charts the piney woods the way
Thoreau charted the pond, searching for the deepest, truest sign (and
mapping fires on the side), right in the middle of things. This is
feasible within the frame of romantic naturalism, pantheism you might say.
Thoreau was capable of deep moral outrage even if Richard Rorty isn't.

How do we know Tom More is closer to Fr. S. than to Thoreau? Isn't that
worth thinking about? Can someone just say directly and plainly what Dr.
Tom More thought Fr. S. meant by "tenderness leads to the gas chambers!"

I'll bankroll the author of the best account as a "Moviegoer" in Friends
of the Walker Percy Project.

I'll be judge, I'll be jury, but there will be a winner not later than
4/30.

Aphoristic one-liners leave too much to the reader's imagination; the
author has to win the prize.

I appreciate Ken's (Fyodor's) kind consideration.

Ed