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.

Someone Once Told Me...

The world is full of assholes, it's unequivocal. About one in three people is an asshole. Now that being said, you really have to stop and think. When we're born we're not given a manual on how to “be”. We don't know how to go through this thing called life. The thing about humans is we know we're gonna die; don't know when or how but we know that life will come to an end, so we're all just trying to figure out how to get through life. So, the next time your talking with three people, one of whom is an asshole, and you've probably already decide which one, ask yourself this: Is he an asshole due to genetic reasons, which is completely possible, or is it just that this is the only way he knows how to get through life? And do you really know how to get through it any better than anyone else? No, you say, but at least I'm not an asshole. But consider this, each of those three people you're talking to is also talking to three people and each has decided which is the asshole, so chances are good at least one of those three people you're talking to thinks you're an asshole.

Quotes

When I was changing careers and going part-time to Chubb Institute for computers I kept with me a small copy of a Monet print: Girl With Parasol. I also kept several quotes and literary passages. Both helped me get through all the technical stuff by balancing the left side of my brain with the right.

As a reminder, I was an English major in college and not completely technical. I've add several quotes and passages since. Below are the words I still have hanging in my cubical at work.

You do all you can to humanize and familiarize the world, and suddenly it becomes more strange than ever. The living are not what they were, the dead die again and again, and at last for good.

Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)

How strange to think there was a time when all those first times were yet to come. The first time we kissed...the first time she shed her clothes for me; the first time my bare palms pressed her bare breasts; the first time...Then suddenly all these first times were passed through, like a dizzy mist; there was this woman who had stepped out of the possibility into actuality, as if I had validated her existence. To put your arms around another. To say, be mine, be here, always be here. And then one day, she was gone; where she had been there was air.

Graham Swift (Ever After)

We are all born for love. It is the principle of existence, and its only end.

Benjamin Disraeli

We are here to add what we can to life, not to get what we can from it.

William Osler

You're only out when you stay out and you stay out when you don't believe.

David + David (Swallowed by the Cracks)

The clouds above us join and separate,

The breeze in the courtyard leaves and returns.

Life is like that, so why not relax?

Who can stop us from celebrating?

Lu Yu

His death was quiet; rain on the sea.

I know only fragments of what Athos' death contained: no less than all the elements and their powers, ten thousand names for things, the humility of lichen. The instincts of migration: stars, magnetism, angles of light. The energy of time that alters mass. The element that reminded him most of his country, salt: olives, cheese, vine leaves, sea foam, sweat. Fifty years of intimacy with Kostas and Daphne, his memory of their bodies at twenty; his own body, as a child, at fifteen, at twenty-five and fifty, the selves that remain as we age, just as words remain on the page though darkness erases them. Two wars, which are both the rotten part of the fruit that can't be cut away and the fruit; that there's nothing a man will not do to another, nothing a man will not do for another. But who was the woman who first unbuttoned for him the two birds of her breasts in a night garden? Did he remember Helen's hands holding his or were they in his hair or were her arms outstreched when his head rested on her thighs? Did they imagine children, what words did they regret? Who as the first woman whose hair he washed, what song could have been his own voice singing of love when he first heard it?

When a man dies, his secrets bond like crystals, like frost on a window. His last breath obscures the glass.

Anne Michaels (Fugitive Pieces)

There was a wall in him that no one reached. Not even Clara, though she assumed it had deformed him. A tiny stone swallowed years back, that had grown with him and which he carried around because he could not shed it. His motive for hiding it had probably extinguished itself years earlier...Patrick and his small unimportant stone. It had entered him at the wrong time in his life. Then it had been a flint of terror. He could have easily turned aside at the age of seven or twenty, and just spat it out and kept on walking, and forgotten it by the next street corner.

So we are built.

Now there is a moat around her he will never cross again. He will not even cup his hands to drink its waters. As if, having travelled all that distance to enter the castle in order to learn its wisdom for the grand cause, he now turns and walks away.

Michael Ondaatje (In the Skin of a Lion)