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d89fb6c
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the origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver.
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Walker Percy |
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f3ee4f1
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But if there's nothing wrong with me, he thought, then there is something wrong with the world. And if there is nothing wrong with the world, then I have wasted my life and that is the worst mistake of all.
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Walker Percy |
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8b671df
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Is all niceness then or is all buggery? How can a man be forty-five years old and still not know whether all is niceness or buggery? How does one know for sure?
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Walker Percy |
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443eca2
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Looking at oneself in a mirror is a self-canceling phenomenon. Eyes looking into eyes make a hole which spreads out and renders one invisible. I had seen more of myself in that single glimpse of a ghostly image in the pier mirror, not knowing it was I.
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Walker Percy |
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2f72990
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We've spoken of the Knights of the Holy Grail, Percival. Do you know what I was? The Knight of the Unholy Grail. In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil. You should be interested! Such a quest serves God's cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think ..
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Walker Percy |
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c43c1e0
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I'll make you a little confession. I am not ashamed to use the word class. I will also plead guilty to another charge. The charge is that people belonging to my class think they're better than other people. You're damn right we're better. We're better because we do not shirk our obligations either to ourselves or to others. We do not whine. We do not organize a minority group and blackmail the government. We do not prize mediocrity for medi..
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Walker Percy |
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cfb7cac
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My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language--you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing--and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves.
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Walker Percy |
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d194f81
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The fateful law of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension--and that is the sign-user himself...The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to whic..
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Walker Percy |
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3542751
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An organism exists in its environment in only one mode, that of an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed to respond or to which it has learned to respond. But a self must be in a world. It cannot be placed. If it chooses by default not to be placed, then its placement is that of not choosing to be placed.
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Walker Percy |
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108426b
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The Great Problematic): Will the ultimate liberation of the erotic from its dialectical relationship with Christianity result in (a) The freeing of the erotic spirit so that man- and womankind will make love and not war? or (b) The trivialization of the erotic by its demotion to yet another technique and need-satisfaction of the organism, toward the end that the demoniac spirit of the autonomous self, disappointed in all other sectors of li..
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Walker Percy |
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699b0a7
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He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that a reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flyin..
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Walker Percy |
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4538a9f
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As for hobbies, people with stimulating hobbies suffer from the most noxious of despairs since they are tranquilized in their despair.
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hobbies
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Walker Percy |
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c251e03
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This Midwestern sky is the nakedest loneliest sky in America. To escape it, people live inside and underground.
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loneliness
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Walker Percy |
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2c377fc
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What nuns don't realize is that they look better in nun clothes than in J. C. Penney pantsuits.
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Walker Percy |
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4899155
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I have observed that it is no longer possible for one young man to speak unwarily to another not known to him, except in certain sections of the South and West, and certainly not with a book in his hand.
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Walker Percy |
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d433886
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He's quite a guy. Do you know what he told me after lying under a cliff for thirty six hours with two inches of his femur sticking out? He said: Queenie, I think I'm going to pass out and before I do, I'm going to give you a piece of advice-God, I thought he was going to die an dknew and was telling me what to do with his book-and he said quite solemnly: Queenie, always stick to Bach and the early Italians-and passed out cold as a mackerel...
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Walker Percy |
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6623772
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Christ should leave us. He is too much with us and I don't like his friends. We have no hope of recovering Christ until Christ leaves us. There is after all something worse than being God-forsaken. It is when God overstays his welcome and takes up with the wrong people.
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Walker Percy |
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c7891d7
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Where did the terror come from? Not from the violence; violence gives release from terror. Not from Leroy's wrongness, for if he were altogether wrong, an evil man, the matter would be simple and no cause for terror. No, it came from Leroy's goodness, that he is a decent, sweet-natured man who would help you if you needed help, go out of his way and bind up a stranger's wounds. No, the terror comes from the goodness and what lies beneath, s..
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Walker Percy |
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e6ccd46
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Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an ar..
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Walker Percy |
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f496696
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Can good come from evil? Have you ever considered the possibility that one might undertake a search not for God but for evil? You people may have been on the wrong track all these years with all that talk about God and signs of his existence, the order and beauty of the universe--that's all washed up and you know it. The more we know about the beauty and order of the universe, the less God has to do with it. I mean, who cares about such thi..
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Walker Percy |
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338e2ce
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Peklo nemuze byt plne ohne - existuji daleko horsi veci.
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Walker Percy |
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2c91443
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Tell me something. Why did I have to know the truth about Margot and know it with absolute certainty? Or rather why, knowing the truth, did I have to know more, prove more, ? Does one need to know more, ever more and more, in order that one put off acting on it or maybe even not act at all?
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Walker Percy |
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7088b31
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Pascal told only half the story. He said man was a thinking reed. What man is, is a thinking reed and a walking genital.
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Walker Percy |
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b024c53
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It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by uppin..
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Walker Percy |
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3e5d658
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She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is So..
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Walker Percy |
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14e742f
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I have nothing else to offer you but my own happiness. Please say that it, at least, measures up, that it is a proper sort of unhappiness.
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Walker Percy |
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e642055
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All arguments between the traditional scientific view of man as organism, a locus of needs and drives, and a Christian view of man as a spiritual being not only unresolvable at the present level of discourse but are also profoundly boring...From the scientific view at least, a new model of man is needed, something other than man conceived as a locus of bio-psycho-sociological needs and drives. Such an anthropological model might be provided..
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Walker Percy |
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57e0ae1
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he believed that there is no end to the mischief and hatred which men harbor deep in themselves and unknown to themselves and no end to their capacity to deceive themselves and that though they loved life, they probably loved death more and in the end would likely win over .
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Walker Percy |
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34318bf
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REMEMBER TOMORROW Starting point for search: It no longer avails to start with creatures and prove God. Yet it is impossible to rule God out. The only possible starting point: the strange fact of one's own invincible apathy - that if the proofs were proved and God presented himself, nothing would be changed. Here is the strangest fact of all. Abraham saw signs of God and believed. Now the only sign is that all the signs in the world make no..
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Walker Percy |
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d099156
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Without faith, people perish, and they are perishing before our eyes
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eyes
faith
god
people
way-of-life
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Walker Percy |
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29ffb97
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Lonnie's monotonous speech gives him an advantage, the same advantage foreigners have: his words are not worn out. It is like a code tapped through a wall. Sometimes he asks me straight out: do you love me? and it is possible to tap back: yes, I love you.
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speech
words
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Walker Percy |
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1ce93b1
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Firing the sunset gun
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Walker Percy |
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40a4f62
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but we know in the South that the real purpose of manners is to make life easier for everyone, easier both to keep to oneself and to avoid the uneasy commerce of offense and even insult. Either one shakes hands with someone or one ignores him or one kills him. What else is there?
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Walker Percy |
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6ac2e9b
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A man is after all himself and no other, and not merely an example of a class of similar selves. If such a man is deprived of the means of being a self in a world made over by science for his use and enjoyment, he is like a ghost at a feast. He becomes invisible. That is why people in the modern age took photographs by the million: to prove despite their deepest suspicions to the contrary that they were not invisible.
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Walker Percy |
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bc62f10
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I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle.
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carriageways
coffee
cottages
courtyards
creosote
ironwork
royal-street
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Walker Percy |
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02e99e0
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I cannot tolerate this age. And I will not. I might have tolerated you and your Catholic Church, and even joined it, if you had remained true to yourself. Now you're part of the age. You've the same fleas as the dogs you've lain down with. I would have felt at home at Mont-Saint-Michel, the Mount of the Archangel with the flaming sword, or with Richard Coeur de Lion at Acre. They believed in a god who said he came not to bring peace but the..
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Walker Percy |
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e9c0db9
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Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos--novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes--you are beyond doubt the strangest or Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life
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Walker Percy |
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bdc4ad6
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I prefer to live in the South but on my own terms. It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as not to succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South.
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Walker Percy |
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124eb4c
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The happiness of the South was very formidable. It was an almost invincible happiness. It defied you to call it anything else. Everyone was in fact happy. The women were beautiful and charming. The men were healthy and successful and funny; they knew how to tell stories. They had everything the North had and more. They had a history, they had a place redolent with memories, they had good conversation, they believed in God and defended the C..
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Walker Percy |
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25e5aa4
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Unlike him I had been unable to escape into the simple complexities of science. All he had to do was solve the mystery of the universe, which may be difficult but is not as difficult as living an ordinary life...(How happy scientists are! Why didn't we become scientists, Percival? They confront problems which can be solved. We don't know what we confront. Does it have a name?)
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Walker Percy |
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4e52c8d
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a great culture is recognizable through its artists and its saints and not by its GNP.
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Walker Percy |
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3840481
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A writer worth his salt is probably better off in an adversarial relation with the U.S. Senate.
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Walker Percy |
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be05a8f
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Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man, to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and a feeling of affection and freedom and justice. These words of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus strike me as pretty good advice, for even the orneriest young scamp.
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Walker Percy |
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365a15e
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At this moment the President is beginning to speak in New Orleans and the Vice-President is mounting the platform at NASA a few miles away. Both are making a plea for unity. The President, who is an integrationist Mormon married to a liberated Catholic, will appeal to Leftists to respect law and order. The Vice-President, a Southern Baptist Knothead married to a conservative Unitarian, is asking Knotheads for tolerance and understanding, et..
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Walker Percy |