Archives for July 2012

Reading the Journals again.  How can I not, when the first line of the first entry is, “In middle age there is mystery, there is mystification”? (I did not remember this, but merely felt impelled to pull the book from the shelf last night.)  When the seventh page yields this:  “As I approach my fortieth birthday without having accomplished any one of the things I intended to accomplish – without ever having achieved the deep creativity that I have worked toward for all this time – I feel that I take a minor, an obscure, a dim position that is not my destiny but that is my fault, as if I had lacked, somewhere along the line, the wit and courage to contain myself competently within the shapes at hand.  I think of Leander and the others.  It is not that these are stories of failure; that is not what is frightening.  It is that they are dull annals; that they are of no import; that Leander, walking in the garden at dusk in the throes of a violent passion, is of no importance to anyone.  It does not matter.  It does not matter…”

I owe his son Benjamin an apology.  I told someone recently that Benjamin published his father’s journals against his father’s explicit wishes, that he had announced as much in the book’s introduction.   This was, in fact, exactly backwards.  His father explicitly requested that the journals be published.  Middle age and failing memory.

How much he had in common with Percy – the Westchester Percy, or Percy the Southern Cheever.  And looky here:  “I remember my father, rising at six.  He takes a cold bath and goes out to play four holes of golf before breakfast.  The links are hilly and there is a fine view of the village and the sea.  He dresses for business and eats a hearty breakfast – fish hash with poached eggs and popovers, or some chops.  I and the dog walk with him to the station, where he hands me his walking stick and the dog’s leash, and boards the train among his friends and neighbors.  The business he transacts in his office is simple and profitable, and at noon he has a bowl of crackers and milk for lunch at his club.  He returns on the train at five, and we all get into the Buick and drive to the beach.  We have a bathhouse, a simple building on stilts, weathered by the sea winds.  there are lockers for dressing, and a fireplace for rainy days.  We change and go for a long swim in that green, dark, and briny sea.  then we dress and, smelling of salt, go up the hill to have supper in the cavernous dining room.  When supper is over, my mother goes to the telephone.  ‘Good evening, Althea,’ she says to the operator.  ‘Would you please ring Mr. Wagner’s ice-cream store?’  Mr. Wagner recommends his lemon sherbet, and delivers a quart a few minutes later on a bicycle that rattles and rings in the summer dusk as if it were strung with bells.  We have our ice cream on the back lawn, read, play whist, wish on the evening star for a gold watch and chain, kiss one another good night, and go to bed.  These seemed to be the beginnings of a world, these days all seemed like mornings, and if there was a single incident that could be used as a turning point it was, I suppose, when my father went out to play an early game of golf and found dear friend and business associate on the edge of the third fairway hanging dead from a tree.”

You guys, I pass hundreds of these things by each day – documenting the seepage of porn into mainstream culture is a little bit like documenting global warming:  a fair portion of the world thinks it doesn’t exist no matter what evidence you bring to bear, and a fair portion of those who do admit it exists disagree about what it means.  And I’m not getting any research grant money out of the whole thing, so.  But this, this combines academia and the British press, so I’m pretty much obliged.

Last weekend, The Onion‘s AV Club took a trip to San Diego for a little gathering of 125,000 pop-culture devotees.  Todd VanDerWerff has been keeping a journal, and his final entry contains this little gem:

“For an instant, it becomes ever more clear why those evangelists have set up camp outside the convention center all weekend long. We’ve taken the language and reverence of religion and turned it into something else. Whether that’s entirely healthy is a question I’m not qualified to answer. But there is no doubt when you’re sitting in Hall H. Everything is carefully made to stimulate you in a certain fashion, and when the moment comes, it’s easy to give in to rapture. The media coverage of the event strikes me as ever sillier, simply because everything is so strenuously created to provoke the desired reaction. And when you’re sitting in a crowd of nearly 7,000, all of whom are raising their voices in joy at what they’ve just seen, it’s hard not to be affected by that. It’s an ocean to pour your hope into, a place where pop culture really can save.”

That’s a remarkable claim there at the end, the notion that simply having an ocean to pour your hope into is itself salvific.  It’s also a fine admission at the beginning.  The conclusion is equally worth attending:

“I’ve got all these little geek islands I live on, and when I come to a place like this, it feels good to walk across bridges to other ones. Comic-Con may be big and unwieldy and ultimately pointless, but it’s also continental drift in reverse, bringing all of the pieces back together toward Pangaea.”

Many members, one body.  The love that moves from one lonely soul to another. The difference that Christians profess, of course, is that the Body of Christ, while big and unwieldy, is not ultimately pointless.  That’s the hilariously loopy claim at the heart of faith, Mr. VanDerWerff:  that the best stories are true.

Walker Percy, cover your eyebones:

…them Sirens loved me up and turned me into a heady toad!