We went to Maple Street bookstore tonight and their new motto is “Love Among the Ruins,” a fitting motto for anyone living in New Orleans at this time. It’s a little local bookstore, a booklovers paradise, exactly what you’d imagine if you thought of a dusty old bookshop from a mystery novel or a curiosity shop. Dirty, tattered, charming, and filled with books!
I just finished reading The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, who also wrote Love Among the Ruins. Apparently Mr. Percy was a devoted customer of Maple Street bookstore, and I heard a lot about him from Dr. Robert Coles, my writing professor at Harvard, a living legend, a soft-spoken brilliant man who worked on books with Walker Percy, Dr. Coles as writer, Mr. Percy as photographer. I loved The Moviegoer. It raised some wonderful and profound points, my favorite being that while the majority of Americans believe in God and a very small percentage are atheist or agnostic, there is no category for the seekers who are searching for the sacred, the great spirit known to many as God.
Coming from a huge tightknit Mormon family from Utah, I get asked often by nieces and nephews about my relationship with God, Jesus, church, etc. I never know what to say except “I believe in fairies.” But I’ve found my answer in The Moviegoer. I’m a seeker, on a (most likely) neverending search for God. Any faith I may have had hanging onto my soul in tiny tatters was torn away two years ago with the hurricane. I’m still shook up. I didn’t realize just how shook up until George asked me to fill the car up the other day in case of evacuation. My visceral reaction was nausea, shaking, tears. I weathered through, pushed it away, but I’m still stunned. The heartbreaking stories, this magical city that was holding on by a thread, it’s overwhelming.
And so I’ll continue to seek, to search for the sacred. Because I think how could there possibly be a God when there are hurricanes; but then I hold my babies, or see fireflies lighting up the woods around our Vineyard like starlight dancing in the trees, and I think, how could there not be?
I have just finished “The Moviegoer” myself. I heard it described as one of the greatest works of American existentialism, on par with Camus’ “The Stranger.” What was most profound to me about the book was the feeling you just can’t put your finger on, but which can subtely overwhelm you; a dissatisfaction with the world which you can try and explain, ignore or accept, like his characters. Call it the avoidance of the modern malaise or the quest for the spiritual, I don’t know. The protagonist in the end found purpose (although it seemed to be handed to him and he accepted it without much conviction), and that’s what seems to be what Percy was getting at, all the characters invented their own purpose and philosophy for living, one not necessarily being better than the other. Does hardship in life invalidate a higher purpose and a God as as the mastermind behind it? Walker Percy became a Catholic at some point, so I am interested in how he came to that desicion.
I loved the way Walker Percy would use concepts like “the malaise” or “the wonder” but never really explain what he meant, assuming the reader would come to their own understanding from their own experience. I understood immediately, although I would have a hard time articulating my thoughts.
As for hardship in life invalidating a higher purpose with God as the mastermind, I find it really interesting that is a question a reader would come away with. Certainly in life, I have found religious people often become even more faithful and devoted during and after times of hardship.
My reaction to this is one of complete and utter wonder.
I too would be interested in how Percy became a Catholic.
Yes, he doesn’t define what the malaise is, but you understand what it is, or what you think it is. I can’t help but recognize it myself now and try to avoid at times, and then at once I don’t know if it really exists, afraid I am creating an overcomplicated and convoluded way of looking at even simple situations. But his going on about wanting to be “somebody somewhere” not a “nobody nowhere” or an “anybody anywhere” speaks to me of purpose, at least of confidence in one’s existence.
I suppose what caught my attention about your post was the mentioning of the book which I don’t know anyone to have read and have been anxious to discuss with someone, and as you described the “search for the sacred” and how it can be impacted by the hardships in life (an obvious understatement when dealing with what happened in New Orleans). I suppose there is no real point to me in believing in anything sacred, or a divine source, if it can’t provide a purpose during life’s catastrophes or, perhaps even more importantly as shown “the moviegoer”, during life’s mundane or subtle erosion of enthusiasm/spirit.
I found an interesting article (here:
http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0129.html) which articulated well the ongoing theme of “seeking” in his Percy’s books (which now I want read even more). That he would become a Catholic after all this pondering, rather than simply searching for something spiritual in a modern or amorphous way is, as I said, something that would interesting to find out. I am hoping he talks of this in his essays.