[percy-l] Walker Percy Exhibit in NYC, Jan. 17-19, scheduled at Crossroads Cultural Center
Henry Mills
wppdirector at gmail.com
Tue Jan 28 09:40:26 EST 2014
This is a forwarded post for list member Chuck Lowry
<lowry.charles at gmail.com>.
Thanks, Chuck!
Henry Mills
--
Post by Chuck Lowry:
I went this afternoon to the Walker Percy exhibit put on by New York
Encounter, a cultural outreach of the Catholic association Communion
and Liberation. The program comprised twenty-nine (yes, I counted
them) posters arranged around four walls. The slides offered
perspectives on biographical, literary and philosophical aspects of
Percy's life and work.
The commentary was prepared and the Percy quotation selected by Tom
Tobin, an academic who is a familiar figure at New York-area
conferences on Percy. Tom makes no secret of the fact that he read *The
Moviegoer* at the behest of an acquaintance and immediately put his
life on hold until he had read all the rest of Percy. That is, I note,
exactly what happened to me. Tom seemed to indicate that his two
favorite Percy novels were *Love in the Ruins* and *The Second Coming*.
Between Friday evening and Sunday evening there were eight or ten
"guided tours" around the posters. I was fortunate to attend one at
noon today that was conducted by Tom himself, though he did not conduct
them all. The tour I was on took nearly an hour.
I had the impression that most of the folks on the tour were more
interested in Catholicism than in literature, but in an hour they got a
good bit of information on Percy's life, the influences on him and the
varieties of his work. If I may be taken as a typical member of this
list, I would probably say that I did not learn anything, but I was
reminded --pleasantly-- of many things, and I'm sure now that I'll go
back and look at some Percy writing again. It is, I am sure you will
all agree, a great thing to be reminded of the great Percy quotations.
I shall close this note with one such:
"I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music
and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at
all. Generally I do as I please. A man, wrote John, who says he
believes in God and does not keep his commandments is a liar. If John
is right, then I am a liar. Nevertheless, I still believe." *Love in
the Ruins*
Substitute *literature* for *science* and I think I'll plead guilty and
throw myself on the mercy of the Court.
Chuck Lowry
Brooklyn, NY
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