That's Vanity

Walker Percy does a short jog, working up a sweat, in French despair a la Camus, and finds a glimpse of God. Cormac McCarthy trudges in agony for a lifetime and finds nothing.




[This dramatic reading shows the screenwriters' faithful but creative adaptation of the original.]

To watch video, try this link:

http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/language_tips/auvideo/2008-03/14/content_6537967.htm

I shouldn't diminish Percy's effort, though his happy ending in The Moviegoer seems an aim at Hollywood comedy a la The Graduate rather than Christian optimism. Here's a few more lines from the novel:

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies - my only talent - smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall - on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair. The movies are onto the search, but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place-but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two weeks time he is so sunk in everydayness that he might just as well be dead.

And the novel's epigraph taken from Kierkegaard:

. . . the specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.

I Hate Plastic and Subdivisions

“Every asylum in this nation is filled with poor souls who simply cannot stand lanolin, cellophane, plastic, television, and subdivisions.”

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

An Ordinary Catholic Woman

The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy

Sometimes when she mentions God, it strikes me that my mother uses him as but one of the devices that come to hand in an outrageous man’s world, to be put to work like all the rest in the one enterprise she has any use for: the canny management of the shocks of life. It is a bargain struck at the very beginning in which she settled for a general belittlement of everything, the good and the bad. She is as wary of good fortune as she is immured against the bad, and sometimes I seem to catch sight of it in her eyes, this radical mistrust: an old knowledgeable gleam, as old and sly as Eve herself. Losing Duval, her favorite, confirmed her in her election of the ordinary. No more heart’s desire for her, thank you. After Duval’s death she has wanted everything colloquial and easy, even God.

"But now do you know what he wants to do? Fast and abstain during Lent." Her eyes narrow. Here is the outrage. "He weighs eighty pounds and he has one foot in the grave and he wants to fast." She tells it as a malignant joke on Lonnie and God. For a second she is old Eve herself.

This Explains Everything Part 3

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini

Salesmen, advertisers and other compliance professionals manipulate us through use of these six principles of persuasion:
--our human sense of reciprocity
--need for internal commitment/consistency
--attraction to scarcity
--being influenced by liking someone or something,
--appeals to authority, and
--social proofs.

This Explains Everything Part 2

Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior, by Geoffrey Miller

Our successes and failures (and consumer purchases) are linked to these traits--all genetic, heritable and consistent through life:

1. intelligence
2. openness
3. conscientiousness
4. agreeableness
5. stability
6. extroversion

Thomas Wolfe on Aline Bernstein and Aline Bernstein on Thomas Wolfe

William B. Wisdom had been gathering Wolfe's writings for years. He planned to establish a memorial at Harvard--a collection of all the Wolfe material he could get hold of, including, he hoped, the passionate love letters between Wolfe and Mrs. Bernstein. The sweetests and ugliest sentiments were conveyed in those letters. One of the most memorable salutations, for example, read, "My heavy-breasted, grey-haired Jewish bitch, I love the stench of your plum-colored arm-pits."

. . .

After several years of negotiating, Wisdom purchased [Bernstein's letters from Wolfe]. Mrs. Bernstein demanded that every penny of the money due her go to the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Writing to [Maxwell Perkins] about this stipulation, she said: "It will be a retaliation for all the insults to the Jews that Tom hurled at me."

Max Perkins, Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg, Pocket Books, 1978, p.524-525

This Explains Everything

Anne-Louise-Germaine de Stael-Holstein (nee Necker)
Madame de Stael
Delphine (1802)
5-page tale "The Reasons Why Leontine de Ternan Decided to Become a Nun.

"I was once a very beautiful woman, and I am now fifty years old. The two absolutely ordinary facts have been the cause of everything I have ever felt in life."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22689?email