Who Am I and Why Am I Here?

http://www.kareyperkins.com/percy/percy.html

"Who am I, and why am I here?"

(Will Barrett asks this question in Walker Percy's second novel, The Last Gentleman.) In other words, what is the meaning of life, the purpose for living? Some things that his characters discover the purpose for living is NOT:

Social conformity or approbation in any form:

Social approval or group acceptance

Social status or class

Material success: making money

Career success

Fame, fortune or stardom

Scientific progress, advancement of knowledge

Appreciation or creation of art, music, literature

Entertainment

Athletic prowess, such as, a good golf game, football-hero-status, running a marathon

Physical health

Physical comfort, pleasure or escape, such as:

Sex

Food

Alcohol or drugs

Religious belief

Traditional religion, ritual

Feel-good religion: born-again Christianity, Pentacostals

Religious unbelief: atheism

Charitable good works: helping others

Creating or living in the Perfect Society

Country or society

Home and family

Friends

Psychological health

Self actualization

Enjoying nature, the "wonders of the universe"

For Percy, the above are meaningless reasons to continue our existence. A hard and fast existentialist would point us to the most prominent explanation for this stance: We're all going to die anyway. The one inevitable, inescapable truth of life is that we will die eventually. What we do on this earth until our only certain and inevitable fate (death) catches up with us is only, and merely, a temporary distraction, an arbitrary social construction we've adopted as our purpose, that we're temporarily deluded has lasting import and meaning, but does not... since everything we do will end with our death.

You may be thinking: "What's left?" What's left after you take away the above reasons for living? Good question, and you're onto something, because the answer is: Not much. In fact, the above illusions as reasons for living give us a framework for acting, enable us to act. Take them away, as happens often to Percy's protagonists, and you are left with TIME: empty time to fill up until your death, and no idea what to do with it.

Percy's characters often wander aimlessly as a result, or exhibit apathy or strange detachment to the events that do occur -- whether daily rituals or chance occurrences. All of Percy's progagonists are once-removed from their experiences, often gazing with curious detachment at the events that occur to them, as though they are standing outside themselves. They are, to a greater or lesser degree, "out of touch" with the "real" world, which Percy sometimes literally draws as amnesia or "fugue states" bedeviling his protagonists.

Sometimes these wanderers have a quest, often a quirky or odd quest, sometimes they do not, and instead, wander about directionless. Of those that have a quest, Lancelot was on the quest for the "unholy grail," and Will Barrett in The Second Coming quests for a sign of God's existence.

While they may seem lost to the rest of the world, and to themselves, for Percy, they are closer to the truth, meaning, and purpose of life than those who march determinedly through the world, quite certain of their next step, their goals, and their desires. Because in the midst of this void of meaning, on the other side of this chasm of emptiness, is real and lasting purpose and meaning. Percy's protagonists exist in the midst of Kierkegaard's "Leap of Faith," suspended over the chasm, having abandoned one side of the cliff, the physical world and all that is in it, and having not yet reached the other side. Percy's characters exhibit various stages of spiritual development so that while they may seem lost, in reality they are really "onto something" and closer to truth, or a ultimate and lasting answer (as Percy sees it), than the rest of their world.

One of Percy's themes was "knowing what you want to do" and what you want others to do, and the effect that has on others. (Usually, they'll just do what you say, so impressed are they that someone knows what he wants.) Closely aligned with this is a feeling of immobilization some of his characters experience, and the reverse side of the same coin, the realization of the "freedom to act" once the character has shirked off all socially given expectations for behavior and being.

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The above fits hand in glove with Ernest Becker's The Denial Of Death quoted at the top of this blog...and I'm pretty sure, now, that falls in line with my own personal view of life and is reflected in my own writing.