The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos
Page 59
We’re talking Caucasian. Look at them over there, he says, nodding toward the five Jews.
What about them?
They’re conspiring.
Conspiring? Conspiring to do what?
Take over.
They’re not conspiring. They’re arguing. How about the Catholics down there?
We’re talking American. No foreign potentates.
America? What America? There is no America.
Us. American and Christian.
I see. The Captain takes another drink from Jason McBee’s fruit jar and seems to fall into deep thought. Then he begins to laugh.
The others look at him in astonishment. When he catches sight of their faces, he laughs all the harder.
Presently Jason McBee asks him: What you laughing at, Captain?
Nothing much, says the Captain. I was just thinking: Jesus Christ, here we go again.
Below, the old abbot, now withered as a stick, turns from the altar to face the people.
ABBOT: Lord, have mercy on us.
PEOPLE: Christ, have mercy on us.
ABBOT: Lord, have mercy on us.
One of the hippies on the hillside shakes his head. I never did like Sunday, he says. “Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.” Softly he sings an old twentieth-century song:
On the Sunday morning sidewalks
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned
Makes a body feel alone
And there’s nothing short of dying
Half as lonesome as the sound
On the sleeping city sidewalks
Sunday mornin’ comin’ down.
Let’s move on, he says to his comrades. They do.
The Captain rises creakily, takes a pull of the golden liquor.
“I got to get back to the cabin,” he says to no one in particular. “Jane will be looking for me. I got a pig in my smoker. I use pecan for smoking. Beats hickory.”
One day, in New Ionia or Tennessee, as the case may be, a message is received on the Copernicus antenna, evidently sent many times, for, after it was recorded, it was repeated again and again. Its source was nothing else than an ETI (extraterrestrial intelligence), the first after all these hundreds of years of monitoring.
Question: Where would you rather be when the message is received—
(1) Tennessee?
(2) New Ionia?
The Message:
Message to Star: G2V, r = 9.844 kpc, 0 = 00°05'24'', 0 = 206°28'49'' (our sun)
Planets: a = 1.5 × 1013 cm, M = 6 × 1027 g, R = 6.4 × 108cm, p = 8.6 × 104, p = 3.2 x 107 s (the inner planets of the solar system)
Repeat. Do you read? Do you read? Are you in trouble? How did you get in trouble? If you are in trouble, have you sought help? If you did, did help come? If it did, did you accept it? Are you out of trouble? What is the character of your consciousness? Are you conscious? Do you have a self? Do you know who you are? Do you know what you are doing? Do you love? Do you know how to love? Are you loved? Do you hate? Do you read me? Come back. Repeat. Come back. Come back. Come back.
(CHECK ONE)
*The adventures recounted here owe something to Walter M. Miller’s extraordinary novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, from which I have borrowed Leibowitz and the state of Utah.
Author’s Note
This book was twenty years in the writing. All chapters except the last appeared as articles in journals. One chapter was published in 1954, another in 1975. Since my recurring interest over the years has been the nature of human communication and, in particular, the consequences of man’s unique discovery of the symbol, a certain repetitiveness in the articles is inevitable. Some of the repetition has been preserved here, for example, the “Helen Keller phenomenon,” if for no other reason as evidence at least of the longevity of my curiosity and my inability to get rid of it. This particular bone, I thought, needed worrying.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals for their permission to reprint the articles: The Southern Review, University of Houston Forum, Sewanee Review, Partisan Review, Katallagete, Thought, Psychiatry, The New Scholasticism, The Modern Schoolman, The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
A Biography of Walker Percy
By Judy Khan
When Walker Percy was diagnosed with tuberculosis at twenty-six, what might have seemed a serious setback for a recent medical school graduate turned into a life-altering career change. During the years Percy spent recovering at Trudeau Sanatorium in upstate New York, reading literature and religion, falling under the spell of European existential philosophers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Søren Kierkegaard, he turned his focus from healing bodies to healing souls. Returning to his native South, he married Mary Bernice Townsend, converted to Catholicism, and settled into the life of a writer/philosopher. Like the Europeans he admired, he expressed his fascination with philosophy in fictional form, publishing six novels before his death at home in Covington, Louisiana, in 1990.
With the publication of his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), which won the National Book Award, Percy was immediately recognized as a leading Southern writer. His handling of major existential themes such as alienation, loss of faith, and search for meaning, expressed through the characters of Binx Bolling and Kate Cutrer, left no doubt that he was a writer of great philosophical depth.
Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916. Undoubtedly his thematic concerns reflected his own childhood tragedies of losing his grandfather and father to suicide and, soon after, his mother to a car accident. Walker and his two brothers were adopted by a cousin, William Alexander Percy (“Uncle Will”), a lawyer, writer, and Southern traditionalist living in Greenville, Mississippi, whose values shaped the Moviegoer character Aunt Emily.
But it’s Binx, a Korean War veteran and New Orleans stockbroker, who most clearly embodies Percy’s own brand of Christian existentialism. Though Binx’s daily activities of making money in the stock market, sexually pursuing a series of secretaries, and moviegoing might seem shallow and avoidant, his inner life is anything but. Internally, he observes and interprets life according to “the search,” a complex philosophical stance of how to live in a world where the traditional values of religious faith and Southern stoicism are crumbling. His female counterpart, Kate, is also adrift after the death of her mother when Kate was still a young girl. Filled with anxiety, at times suicidal, Kate seeks refuge in familial rebellion, pills, and the one person who understands her—Binx. For Kate, Binx’s search is an antic preoccupation; for Binx it is an existential quest of the highest order.
As readers, we might not see the overlapping consciousness that develops between these two isolated southerners, nor do we necessarily see Binx’s movement toward conversion. Yet the novel’s conclusion suggests that salvation can be achieved, that freedom from despair is possible, and that an authentic life can be lived.
Percy outside his family’s home on Arlington Avenue in Birmingham, Alabama. Percy traced his earliest memories, such as watching a Krazy Kat cartoon at a local movie theater, back to his childhood in this neighborhood.
Percy (standing at right) with his father, LeRoy Percy Sr., and his younger brother, LeRoy Percy Jr. Percy’s father, a successful lawyer and Princeton alumnus, suffered frequent bouts of anxiety and depression. In 1929, like his own father a few years earlier, the elder LeRoy committed suicide by shooting himself in the head. Shortly thereafter, Walker lost his mother in a car crash that was deemed an accident. These events haunted Percy throughout his life and shaped some of the thematic concerns of his fiction.
Walker (right) with his brothers, LeRoy (middle) and Phinizy (left), during their years in Birmingham.
Percy as a pre-med student at UNC-Chapel Hill, “on the way to Charlotte at the beginning of the holidays.” When asked why he chose to study medicine Percy said, “Everybody in my family had been lawyers, it was a tradition in my family to be going into law. And I knew damn well I didn’t want to do that
.”
A picture of Percy taken in New York while he was a medical student at Columbia University. During his internship at Bellevue Hospital, Percy contracted tuberculosis and was prescribed a “rest cure.” He spent the next few years reading literature seriously and eventually began working on a manuscript titled The Charterhouse, which he later destroyed.
Walker (middle) with brother LeRoy (left) and lifelong friend Shelby Foote (right) outside the home of Walker and LeRoy’s cousin, William Alexander Percy, in Greenville, Mississippi. Called “Uncle Will,” William Alexander Percy, an accomplished poet and memoirist, raised Walker and his siblings after their mother’s death. Walker described going to live with his cousin as “the most important thing that ever happened to me as far as my writing is concerned. I never would have been a writer without his influence.”
Percy celebrating Christmas with his wife, Mary Bernice, called Bunt, and his two daughters, Ann Boyd and Mary Pratt, in 1956. Although he had yet to produce a publishable novel, that year he had cause to celebrate when one of his first philosophical articles, “The Man on the Train,” appeared in the fall issue of Partisan Review, an esteemed literary journal.
A publicity photo of Percy taken at Pach Brothers, a famous New York City portrait studio, in 1972 for the release of Love in the Ruins. In Percy’s view the novel dealt with “the decline and fall of the U.S., the country rent almost hopelessly between the rural knotheaded right and the godless alienated left, worse than the Civil War.”
Percy with fellow Southern authors C. Vann Woodward (left) and Eudora Welty (middle) on May 17, 1983, at the ceremony for the Fifth Frank Doubleday Lecture in the Flag Hall of the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C. Percy greatly admired Welty’s work and referred to her as “the best we’ve got now” when asked about the modern Southern literary tradition.
Percy seated on the right between Shelby Foote and Horton Foote (no relation) with fellow members of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, including Elizabeth Spencer and Ernest Gaines, at a ceremony honoring William Styron (back row fourth from left) in 1989. Percy was one of the organization’s charter members. (Photo by Fielding S. Freed.)
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This collection includes works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The Message in the Bottle Copyright © 1954, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1967, 1972, 1975 by Walker Percy
Lost in the Cosmos Copyright © 1983 by Walker Percy
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-5401-0
This edition published in 2018 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
WALKER PERCY
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Find a full list of our authors and
titles at www.openroadmedia.com
FOLLOW US
@OpenRoadMedia