Percy and the Absurd

I love Walker Percy.

Some may get offended by his language, his flippancy, and maybe even his ranting arrogance to some extent; but Dr. Mitchell was right, I think a lot like Walker Percy.

One of the things I love about Percy is his use of absurd irony. When we read the description of Christians and non-believers I had to keep from laughing at loud, because (cleaning up the language a bit) I think the same way most of the time. Walker Percy loves to point out and poke fun at the absurd (I think if he did not, he would go nuts...like perhaps I going) and to really make us confront how farcical our lives really are. The suck of self is evident in all individuals trapped in our modernistic, materialistic, consumerist world; people who as Dr. Mitchell pointed out, are nothing but corpses walking around.

I made a comment to Evel and Jared on the way home from Satori that I wished we lived in the Middle Ages, because life was not boring back then. People were having to grow their own food, fight in brutal wars, and died of many illnesses...but they certainly were not purposeless and bored. We live in an absurd age, as Percy masterfully points out, and for all our science, technology, and success we live boring, pathetic, and meaningless lives. We have no one to blame but ourselves and of course Renee Descartes.

Who would write a deep, wrenching spiritual novel based on a golf course of all places? Why are all these rednecks driving around all these sophisticated automobiles and living in fancy houses? Why are pro golfers trying to be poets and reading Dante for structure? Why has our world devolved into madness that threatens to suck us into the oblivion of our self consciousness or as Evel has put it, "eats our souls?"

Pointimg out the absurd is a way of pointing out the solution: community. We need each other; we are just as pathetic, fallen, and in need as the barbarians who roamed and pillaged Europe during the early Middle Ages. As Percy show us, you take away the Jews (a sign of Judeo-Christian worldview), and we are left as Gentile savages. We have become so absurd we think we are normal and when someone like Allison comes a long, we call them crazy(when in fact, they might be more in touch with reality than we are).

How absurd is it for a young female mental patient to be the only sane one in the whole novel? Yet, we must think this is absurd to realize that it is actually the opposite: it is we who are absurd. Percy does this marvelously and his critique and powerful insight into modernity (Christian and non-Christian) is something I believe every consumerist, modern Christian should have to read.