Archives for May 2020

Rachel Alexander on the Latest Disaster

Over at the Law & Libwrty Blog, Rachel Alexander has some thoughts about updating one of Percy’s better known theories:


Walker Percy had an eccentric theory about disasters. Despite the modern consensus that calamities should be avoided at all costs, the National Book Award-winning novelist speculated that most people actually prefer them to safe, healthy, “good” environments. Moreover, the joie de vivre folks tend to experience in the middle of a crisis (think Louisiana “hurricane parties”) is, Percy posited, the most natural and healthy response for an inhabitant of modernity, with all its technological prowess and progress. Does the COVID-19 outbreak—a disaster if there ever was one—qualify as Percy’s “catastrophe as catalyst in the ontology of joy”? For Percy, the advantage of a disaster lies in its capacity to break through the humdrum, detached routines of modern living. The current pandemic, by contrast, requires us to double down on these very routines, thus revealing limits to Percy’s theory, but making it all the more important to understand.

Read the rest of Rachel’s version here:

The Perverted Salve of Power Outages and Close Quarters

My mom and I

My mom and I
Flew through the sky
Towards the sun
On wings of why

We circled high
And in her eye
Some kindness answered
To my cry