Walker Percy

This is what I need now, this contact with the ocean, this illusion of contact with the waves, this reminder of time running down and down.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life

I refuse to waste my life emptying the garbage of the mind, filling it once again with the junk of compromise, with intelligent nonsense, curling my mind around the semantic pretzels known as disciplinization, analysis, responsibility, and authority.

If only there were a way to escape all the searching and the longing! For if only i could escape, then ultimately escape would amount to a search-hopelessly in order to disguise a longing that has become hopeless.

Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distorting lenses the defects in the lenses of others-- their egos, their fears, their desires-- and you get a pretty mess. What a scramble! It's a wonder we can see anything clearly at all. And the little bit of seeing we do take for reality is really a raw wonder of perception and attention.

Those who can not connect can not survive.

I was not myself. There is a real me, a secret me, and that me is not old and boring and dead. I was never that until now.

It is curious how we live in comedy and tragedy and beckon them to put on their masks and give us a wild thought or two.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural rapport, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man.

Something must be wrong, I told myself. Everything at home is as usual, everything is O.K. there. I refuse to believe that a world exists where everything is all right and yet where you and I are absent. I refuse to accept your absence. I can only accept it if you return. Please come back.

The search is what everyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life...