Walker Percy

I've been reading a lot of him lately . . .and recommend him as much as I recommend Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard and Fyodor Dostoevsky. I just finished his book The Thanatos Syndrome, and have been working through Signposts in a Strange Land. Below is an excerpt from his article "Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time". . . . I've added some gender inclusive language for the sake of myself and other women writers.

"If the novelist's business is, like that of all artists, to tell the truth, even when he or she is lying, that is, making up a story, he or she had better tell the truth no matter how odd it is, even if the truth is a kind of upside-downness. And if it is the novelist's business to look and see what is there for everyone to see but is nonetheless not seen, and if the novelist is by his or her very nature a hopeful man or woman--he or she has to be hopeful or he or she would not bother to write at all--then sooner or later he or she must confront the great paradox of the twentieth century: that no other time has been more life-affirming in its pronouncements, self-fulfilling, creative, autonomous, and so on--and more death-dealing in its actions. It is the century of the love of death. I am not talking just about Verdun or the Holocaust or Dresden or Hiroshima. I am talking about a subtler form of death, a death in life, of people who seem to be living lives which are good by all sociological standards and yet who somehow seem more dead than alive. Whenever you have a hundred thousand psychotherapists talking about being life-affirming and a million books about life-enrichment, you can be sure there is a lot of death around."