Mail call

Dear Fellow Fan,

It was wholly a pleasure to hear from another reader and re-reader of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Someone once said there are three kinds of books: Those you buy but never finish, those you finish and never look at again, and those you finish but find yourself coming back to again and again.

The Moviegoer is that third kind of book. Maybe the book’s popularity was only a generational thing, but let’s hope not. May it stay fresh for succeeding generations, giving them that same sense of half-discovery, half-validation, on finding an author who seems to share what they’ve long felt but never had the words to say. To say it’s a book about New Orleans, or even about the anomie, the purposelessness and alienation of life in ever more mod America, this new Rome, scarcely describes it.

Indeed, what Walker Percy doesn’t say explicitly in The Moviegoer may be the source of its curious attraction, which keeps us coming back to it at long-spaced intervals as the years and the times and the world change, or only seem to.

It’s a book about what the author called the search. The search for what? To spell out what the search is about would defeat its purpose. We must all find our own clues in the search. Not to be in on the search is the worst kind of despair, the kind we don’t know we’re in. Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s just ignorance, and maybe damnation. Meaningless damnation.

To search is to be alive, hurt as it may.

The way awareness does.

“For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead,” says the book’s narrator, Binx Bolling. “It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: Yes, beyond a doubt this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can.”

Haven’t you ever felt that way?

Maybe in the middle of an endless meeting about endless trivia, and all you want to do is slip away as quickly as you can. The feeling good ol’ Binx describes may be more common than we think, which should give us hope.

The more lone searchers, the better.

With the emphasis on lone. When the search becomes a collective endeavor, it may remain a search, but not the search. It becomes just another meeting, a consciousness-raising session, one of those oh-so-deep late night discussions, or whatever the latest substitute for faith is. And there is no health in it.

Thank you for letting me know there are other friends of Binx Bolling out there. Technically, he’s a fictional character, but he’s more real to some of us than many of the automatons we encounter in what is supposed to be real life.

Happy reading to you, and good searching, -

———

Dear Critic,

It was wholly a pleasure to receive your (kind of) scholarly dissent from our editorial lambasting that neo-Bircher who wrote an article for his Republican county newsletter saying legislators who didn’t meet his standards of right-wing orthodoxy could use a good shooting.

Happily, the gentleman-well, the man-is no longer a member of that Republican county committee, which speaks well of it. But you quote no less a personage than Thomas Jefferson in his support, in particular this (spurious) passage from his writings: “When the people fear thegovernment there is tyranny;

when the government fears the people there is liberty. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” It’s doubtful if Mr. Jefferson ever said those words, but if you’re going to fabricate a quotation, attributing it to Jefferson does lend it a certain cachet. And the quote does have a Jeffersonian ring to it. For the sainted Mr. Jefferson did say the country ought to have a revolution every 20 years or so, for “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Ah, yes, just what this republic needs. As if one civil war wasn’t enough.

Another reason I am indebted to you is for refreshing my opinion of Mr. Jefferson’s less amiable traits, for which I’ve long been able to restrain my admiration-whether he was expatiating on the benefits of bloody revolution or living off the labor of his slaves.

Our great advocate of freedom and reason never did get around to emancipating them, unlike other Founding Fathers. It might have meant cutting back on the furnishings at Monticello, or his collection of good books and French wines.

Just sign me Old Federalist or, worse, an admirer of Alexander Hamilton, Mr. Jefferson’s great rival in George Washington’s first cabinet-that stellar collection of talent, intellect, experience and true education seldom if ever matched in American history, andcertainly not in today’s cabinet.

Or just call me-

Inky Wretch

Paul Greenberg is editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. E-mail him at: [email protected]