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a70718c
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This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.
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Walker Percy |
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b716fe8
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Because the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.
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Walker Percy |
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2658d3a
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A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fighting. That is the victory. To do anything less is to be less than a man.
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Walker Percy |
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d4fc770
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Consider to what extent an "antique" is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self--"
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Walker Percy |
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0d5e250
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Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.
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Walker Percy |
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62b31c3
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I subscribe to Consumer Reports and as a consequence I own a first-class television set, an all but silent air conditioner and a very long lasting deodorant. My armpits never stink.
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Walker Percy |
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7c2aa83
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The truth is I dislike cars. Whenever I drive a car, I have the feeling I have become invisible. People on the street cannot see you; they only watch your rear fender until it is out of their way.
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Walker Percy |
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3341709
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Our eyes meet. Am I mistaken or does the corner of her mouth tuck in ever so slightly and the petal of her lower lip curl out ever so richly? She is smiling-at me! My mind hits upon half a dozen schemes to circumvent the terrible moment of separation. No doubt she is a Texan. They are nearly always bad judges of men, these splendid Amazons. Most men are afraid of them and so they fall victim to the first little Mickey Rooney that comes alon..
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Walker Percy |
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881369d
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New Orleans may be too seductive for a writer.
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Walker Percy |
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5d199f7
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The lost self: With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bo..
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Walker Percy |
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7f9a5b6
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One can sniff the ozone from the pine trees, visit the local bars, eat crawfish, and drink Dixie beer and feel as good as it is possible to feel in this awfully interesting century. And now and then, drive across the lake to New Orleans, still an entrancing city, eat trout amandine at Galatoire's, drive home to my pleasant, uninteresting place, try to figure out how the world got into such a fix, shrug, take a drink, and listen to the frogs..
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Walker Percy |
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33ddc86
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But if the saleslady means what she says--and since you have gone through any number of such styles in the past-- then it must follow that the other articles in the past were also you and are no longer. How can that be? It could only be because some sort of consumption takes place. The nought which is you has devoured the style and been sustained for a while as a non-you until the style is emptied out by the noughting self.
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Walker Percy |
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7f5ac9b
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As a Bolling in Feliciana Parish, I became accustomed to sitting on the porch in the dark and talking of the size of the universe and the treachery of men; as a Smith on the Gulf Coast I have become accustomed to eating crabs and drinking beer under a hundred and fifty watt bulb - and one is as pleasant a way as the other in passing a summer night.
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Walker Percy |
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07f52dc
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For example, she did not mind at all if Christendom should be done for, stove in, kaput, screwed up once and all. She did not mind that the Christers were like everybody else, if not worse.
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Walker Percy |
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8b5a83b
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A minor cultural note: In my opinion, local Yankee racists are worse than Southern racists; they don't even like Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas. One can only wonder how Abraham Lincoln ever talked these people into fighting a war to free slaves. And the main difference between local country-clubbers (affluent, often Midwestern) and the local Klan (poor, Southern) is that the former tolerate Jews and Catholics, probably because there are so few..
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Walker Percy |
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f5f04a5
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If Darwin was right, asked Wallace, why does the Tierra del Fuegan possess a brain not discernibly different from, say, Einstein's or Beethoven's, which he does not need?
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Walker Percy |
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0a585b9
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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.
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Walker Percy |
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d3b51ab
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A sharp character--no youth as I feared--a Faubourg Marigny type, Mediterranean, big-nosed, lumpy-jawed, a single stitched-in wrinkle over his eyebrows from just above which there springs up a great pompadour of wiry bronze hair. His face aches with it. He has no use for me at all.
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Walker Percy |
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a07ae04
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When these long telephone silences come, it is a sure sign that love is over.
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Walker Percy |
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60e9bc4
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Our Catholic church here split into three pieces: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go. The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation.
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Walker Percy |
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10ca929
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Dear Mr. Fontenot: Glancing over your portfolio, it struck me that you are not in the best position to take advantage of the dawning age of missiles...
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Walker Percy |
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a73901a
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Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French and Spanish two hundred years ago and the Yankees one hundred years ago. 1948. What a faroff time.
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time
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Walker Percy |
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b70b29b
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The real wonder is not that the Cosmos is now seen as wonderful but that it is not. Despite its inconceivable vastness, it is seen not as wonderful but as something that can be explained as a dyadic system.
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Walker Percy |
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1cee447
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Every place of arrival should have a booth set up and manned by an ordinary person whose task it is to greet strangers and give them a little trophy of local space-time stuff - tell them of his difficulties in high school and put a pinch of soil in their pockets - in order to insure that the stranger shall not become an Anyone.
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Walker Percy |
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547b4e4
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I am consoled only to see that I was not mistaken: Chicago is just as I remembered it. I was here twenty five years ago. My father brought me and Scott up to see the Century of Progress and once later to the World Series. Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place. I could have been wrong: it could have been noth..
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the-south
ghosts
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Walker Percy |
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f6fbd5c
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Some years later, after Scott's death, we came my father and I to the Field Museum, a long dismal peristyle dwindling away into the howling distance, and inside stood before a tableau of Stone Age Man, father mother and child crouched around an artificial ember in postures of minatory quiet--until, feeling my father's eye on me, I turned and saw what he required of me--very special father and son we were that summer, he staking his everythi..
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Walker Percy |
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bb8a407
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Note some odd things about the self's world. One is that it is not the same as the Cosmos-environment. The planet Venus may be a sign in the self's world as the evening star or the morning star, but the galaxy M31 may not be present at all. Another oddity is that the self's world contains things which have no counterpart in the Cosmos, such as centaurs, Big Foot, detente, World War I (which is past), World War III (which may not occur). Yet..
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Walker Percy |
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cb7e421
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He's quite a guy,' Joel told me. '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 then and knew 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..
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Walker Percy |
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8a41372
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Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations.
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Walker Percy |
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e1b5d0a
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Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth.
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Walker Percy |
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40f4fca
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The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology.
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Walker Percy |
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3e52c11
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A repetition is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle.
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time
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Walker Percy |
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1d87dd7
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This decline of literacy is accompanied by a rise in philistinism in America: a preference for the skillfully marketed and packaged product for the consumption of the mass man--the Top Ten on TV, NFL telecasts with the quite well-done Miller Lite and Mean Joe Green commercials--plus a few big commercial novels, whether the Harold Robbins novel in which sex figures second only to money, the Barbara Cartland novel in which sex becomes somethi..
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Walker Percy |
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a3dd937
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Where are the Hittites? Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but not one single Hittite, even though the Hittites had a great flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a weak and obscure people? When one meets a Jew in New York or New Orleans or Paris or Melbourne, it is remarkable that no one considers the event remarkable. What are they doing here? But it is even more remarkble to won..
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Walker Percy |
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aa968cf
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A variant of the amnesic-plot device is the inadvertent return of the amnesiac to home territory, where he is welcomed by a lovely woman, unknown to him, who is evidently his wife. The crucial scene is his being led off to bed. A non-amnesic equivalent is a twin or look-alike who is mistaken for someone else--by a beautiful woman. Invariably she finds him not merely oddly different but somehow better, more attractive, than the original. Aft..
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Walker Percy |
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7be450a
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you have too good a mind to throw away. I don't quite know what we're doing on this insignificant cinder spinning away in a dark corner of the universe. That is a secret which the high gods have not confided in me. Yet one thing I believe and I believe it with every fiber of my being. A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can. In this world goodness is destined to be defeated. But a man must go down fi..
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Walker Percy |
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78f9c00
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For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos.
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Walker Percy |
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bc97036
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We shake hands and part good comrades. But I have to get out of here, good fellows or no good fellows. Too much fellow feeling makes me nervous, to tell the truth.
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Walker Percy |
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39c8cea
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It is difficult for gods to walk the earth without taking the forms of beasts.
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Walker Percy |
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72bbc73
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Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? That is to say: Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?
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Walker Percy |
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2027cd5
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Catastrophe as Catalyst in the Ontology of Joy, or Hurricane Parties on the Gulf Coast during Hurricane Camille: An In-depth Study of Eleven Victims Who Elected to Stay Compared with Eleven Random Control Subjects Who Elected to Leave"?"
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Walker Percy |
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825cd77
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The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it was not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with..
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the-third-man
orson-welles
kittens
movies
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Walker Percy |
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5110a91
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At the end of an age, the denizens of the age still profess to believe that they can understand themselves by the theory of the age, yet they behave as if they did not believe it. The surest sign that an age is coming to an end is the paradoxical movement of the most sensitive souls of the age, the artists and writers first, then the youth, in a direction exactly opposite to the direction laid down by the theory of the age.
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Walker Percy |
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13c1e7f
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The salvation of art derives in the best of modern times from a celebration of the triumph of the autonomous self--as in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony--and in the worst of times from naming the unspeakable: the strange and feckless movements of the self trying to escape itself. Exhilaration comes from naming the unnameable and hearing it named. If Kafka's Metamorphosis is presently a more accurate account of the self than Beethoven's Ninth Sym..
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Walker Percy |