[percy-l] Walker Percy Loves You etc.

Doug Brown wply1223 at gmail.com
Sat Aug 7 15:43:05 EDT 2021


I have received a number of encouraging comments from readers in the
Percy-L community, either here at the listserv or directly to my email. All
of them have delighted me, but perhaps none have delighted me more than
this one from Mr Lowry. (I hope this community will forgive me - a newbie
here - for a bit of fanboy gushing: the novelist Ron Rash left me a
charming and funny voicemail telling me how much he enjoyed my book.)

Part of what I appreciate about Chuck Lowry's posting is that he seems to
lean into the irony that is ingrained in Percy's writing. Would Walker
Percy love either me or Mr Lowry? Was Percy as misanthropic as some of his
writing might suggest? Or was his misanthropy an ironic veneer? Percy
certainly loved his characters and had compassion for them.

And did Walker Percy have a plan for our lives? I'll hazard a guess that
his left eyelid would start to twitch at the suggestion. Clearly, the title
of my book is an ironic play on the old expression that God loves you and
has a wonderful plan for your life. But any plan that Percy might have for
us has less to do with moral dogma or a prescription for happiness, and has
more to do with the frameworks we construct (or inherit) that shape how we
see the narratives of our lives.

That's what I appreciate most about Mr Lowry's post. He acknowledges what I
see as the key point of my book: that language and literature and narrative
all matter - whether it is the poetry and stories that we read, or it is
the stories we tell ourselves and each other about our own lives.

Thank you, Chuck Lowry.

Doug Brown
Asheville, NC
Walker Percy Loves You and Has a Wonderful Plan for Your Life
<https://www.amazon.com/Walker-Percy-Loves-Wonderful-Plan/dp/B096LS1B7M>

On Sat, Aug 7, 2021 at 12:18 PM Charles Lowry <lowry.charles at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Honestly, I have never believed that Walker Percy loved me, or that he
> would have loved me if he had known me.  I can say with certainty that Dr.
> Thomas More would not have loved me, since he says in *Love In The Ruins*,
> "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."  I
> acknowledge that I am a small and insignificant part of the final category
> on that list, loved "hardly at all."
>
> Doug Brown has not convinced me that Walker Percy loves me, or that Walker
> Percy has an excellent plan for the rest of my life.  My personal view is
> that if Walker Percy and I had encountered one another in life, we would
> have handed one another along a ways on the dark journey, "all for good and
> selfish reasons."  It always does come back to *The Moviegoer*, doesn't
> it?
>
> Anyway, after some delay, I finished the book so graciously recommended to
> us by our esteemed (an actual description, not a formulaic insert)
> moderator.  Although I did not necessarily agree with all the author's
> literary judgments, I learned something important from this book.  I
> learned how one person was able to integrate literature into life, and for
> those of us who are not academicians, that is an extremely valuable insight.
>
> Several years ago, at a symposium sponsored by Loyola New Orleans, I gave
> a small and imperfect talk on *The Moviegoer*.  I took as my starting
> point Percy's "ordinary Thursday at 4:00" conundrum: if I read history and
> philosophy and essays and biography and novels and theology all morning,
> shall I be a better person after lunch? The twist I gave it was attuned to
> the theme of the conference: if I read *The Moviegoer* all morning, shall
> I be a better person after lunch?  I realize now that I was probably trying
> to do what Doug Brown did, though he did it more poignantly and at greater
> length.  We need to know why this matters.  We need to know why *The
> Moviegoer* matters, or "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" or *South of the
> Border, West of the Sun* or *Crime and Punishment* or "What We Talk About
> When We Talk About Love" or the *Aeneid *or *The Divine Comedy* or *Don
> Quixote *or any of it.  Doug Brown has offered a solid perspective on how
> literature not only enriches life (we have surely all thought about that)
> but also fits into the gristle and ligaments and aches and pains of life.
> To non-professional readers, that is what makes literature matter.
> Bravo, Doug Brown!
>
> Chuck Lowry
> Brooklyn, New York
>
>
>
> ----------------------------------
> USING PERCY-L
> * Read Percy-L Charter and Policies:
> https://ibiblio.org/wpercy/listserv/charter-policies.html
> * Manage Your Membership:
> https://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/percy-l
> * Submit a Post to Percy-L: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org
> * Contact the Listserv Manager: percy.listserv.manager at gmail.com
>
> LISTSERV ARCHIVES
> * View Percy-L Discussion Archives:
> https://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/
> * Search Percy-L Discussion Archives:
> https://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy/listserv/how-to-search-archives.html
>
> THE WALKER PERCY PROJECT
> * Visit The Walker Percy Project website: https://www.ibiblio.org/wpercy
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20210807/0deef5d1/attachment.html>


More information about the Percy-L mailing list