Happy Birthday, Walker Percy

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a cast away do? Why he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

Walker Percy, born on this day in 1916

As a guest with Eudora Welty on Firing Fine, December 12, 1972 ...

Confluence.

Aguilera, Flight Patterns of Swifts, n/d

I'm prepared now to use the wonderful word confluence, which of itself exists as a reality and a symbol in one. It is the only kind of symbol that for me as a writer had any weight, testifying to the pattern, one of the chief patterns, of human experience. Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memory - the individual human memory. My own is the treasure most dearly regarded by me, in my life and in my work as a writer. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. The memory is a living thing -- it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives -- the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.

Eudora Welty

Happy Birthday, Percy

The salvation of art derives in the best of modern times from a celebration of the triumph of the autonomous self—as in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—and in the worst of times from naming the unspeakable: the strange and feckless movements of the self trying to escape itself. Exhilaration comes from naming the unnameable and hearing it named. 

Walker Percy, born on this day in 1916, from Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

As a guest with Eudora Welty on Firing Fine, December 12, 1972 ...

Nobly.

Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is there for those who deride of slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not exactly what they actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be a cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being whose tepid soul knows nothing of great and generous emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the many errors and valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would have been a valiant soldier."

Theodore Roosevelt, from his speech, “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered at the Sorbonne, April 23, 1910

George Harrison of The Crowned Heads of Anti-Music put it this way ...

Have you seen the little piggies crawling in the dirt?

And for all the little piggies life is getting worse,

Always having dirt to play around in.

Have you seen the bigger piggies in their starched white shirts?

You will find the bigger piggies stirring up the dirt,

Always have clean shirts to play around in.

In their sties with all their backing hey don't care what goes on around,

In their eyes there's something lacking,

What they need's a damn good whacking.

Everywhere there's lots of piggies living piggie lives,

You can see them out for dinner with their piggie wives,

Clutching forks and knives to eat their bacon.

 

Actions.

Remember that it is the actions, and not the commission, that make the officer, and that there is more expected from him, than the title.

George Washington, Address to the Officers of the Virginia Regiment, January, 8, 1756

L.A.M.E. ... Look At Me, Everyone

Never think you’ve seen the last of anything.

Eudora Welty