Yes, I know. the water runs clearly, friendly faces chat about good news, pills slaughter your germs, back seats bulge with mall loot and chocolate-chip bagels are but a few steps away.

Isn't it the best of all possible worlds? You'd rather be a sixth-century Visigoth or an Aztec virgin preparing for her sacrificial duty, maybe?

But there it is, nonetheless, tugging at what some say is your soul. A suspicion that something has gone awry, that in this age of the fit, the prosperous and the wired, someone has forgotten to tell you something important.

And the scinece -- oh, that science. It prolongs your life, brings wonders into your home and explains everything that mystified those impoverished ancients. Everything that is, except for one thing, as Walker Percy puts it:

How indeed is one to live in this peculiar time and history and on ordinary Wednesday afternoons.

Yes, you suspect, there is something wrong, for there are those moments that you realize that modern life, culture and knowledge have left you without something most fundamental --a satisfying understanding of just who you are and why you are here watching the sun put one more day of your life in the past. You must be more than a mere organism or an insatiable, endlessly manipulable consumer. You must be. You must.

This question of the self absorbed Walker Percy, a physician novelist, Southerner and Catholic convert. He picked at it, probed it, and spent his life diagnosing this modern malaise as a philosopher, a writer and a human being making his own courageous way through life.

Through six novels it was his subject, in settings that ranged from the mild streets of a New Orleans suburb, a mental institution, and near-apocalyptic America. His observations are sharp, his tone sometimes veering toward the "flip-savage" as he details our paradoxical times and the elements of contemporary life that claim the power to bring us closer in touch with ourselves, but in reality whisk us further away, more "lost in the cosmos" than ever.

To psychologize art robs it of its power and the true artist is always at something deeper than a mere indulgent exercise in self-expression. But when you take a look at Walker Percy's life, it's hard not to see his interest in the question of why getting up in the morning is possible, much less necessary, as having some connection to the tragic experiences that shaped his young adult life.

Percy was born in 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama, the middle of three brothers. His family was of renowned Southern stock, prosperous, deeply rooted, yet bearing that inevitable faint scent of romance and lost of the postwar south. His uncle, William Alexander Percy, was a lawyer, poet and the author of Lanterns on the Levee, a classic defense of traditional Southern life.

But to talk about Walker Percy and tragedy is to talk about something more devastating and personal than ghosts on battlefields. The facts are plain and almost unbearably sad. In 1917, when Walker was a baby, his father, LeRoy, disocvered his own father seconds after he shot himself through the chest. Twelve years later, LeRoy was also gone by his own hand, a shot through the chin this time.

And then two years later, when Walker Percy was 14, his mother died. The car she was driving plunged into a stream. Most agreed it was an accident, for Percy's younger brother, Phin, was in the car, too, but other explanations inevitably found their way into town gossip. One of Percy's biographers, Jesuit Father Patrick Samway, reports that Percy himself wondered if his mother, too, had committed suicide.

In the context of such a heritage, it is easy to see how the question of existent becomes an urgent one. To put in Percy's own words, uttered in an almost casual moment of self-revelation to a graduate student at LSU, "I guess the central mystery of my life will always be why my father killed himself. Come here, have a seat."

The Percys had been living with their famous Uncle Will in Greeneville, Mississippi since their father's suicide, and upon their mother's death, he adopted the boys. It was Greeneville, incidentally, that Percy made one of his closest lifelong friends -- Shelby Foote, who also grew up to be a writer, most notably of the epic history of the Civil War. Some of Percy and Foote's correspondence has been collected in this excellent volume, edited by another Percy biographer, Jay Tolson.

Althought Percy worked on the school newspaper in high school and was an astute observer of all that surrounded him, writer was not his first chosen vocation. As an undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he embraced science, majoring in chemistry. He graduated from Columbia Medical School, and although with diminishing enthusiasm for the profession, intended to be a physician. But while serving an internship in a pathology lab, that plan ended when he contracted tuberculosis.

Unable to practice medicine in the way he had planned, recovering in a sanitarium in upstate New York, then back home in the South, Percy faced yet another crisis, life-threatening on every level. What was he to do?

The decision was a rather astonishing one, as Tolson explains:

"Percy was at rock bottom in his early 30's...in despair, Percy took a gamble. He abandoned the future he had been preparing for and set off on a completely unanticipated course -- the life of a writer."

The decision to write was not the only one he made around this time. He also married, moved to Louisiana an, along with his wife, converted to Catholicism. Percy had spent his recovery from TB in intense reading of literature and philosophy, all of which contributed to his interest in unpacking the mystery of what ailed the human psyche, not just the body. His serious reading of the Bible and various philosophers led him to conclude that of all the choices available - scientism, relativism, the romantic stoicism of his Uncle Will - Christianity offered the most realistic assessment of human nature, in all of its weakness and possibilites.

Success was long in coming to Percy. He wrote two unpublished novels during the 1950's, one of which he actually burned. He also spent those years developing his interest in philosophy, particularly semiotics, a philosophy of language, a discipline in which Percy wrote extensively as well.

His third fiction attempt, The Moviegoer, was the charm. Published in 1961, when Percy was 45, it attracted gradual but persistent attention and wone the National Book Award the following year.

The Moviegoer reflects all of Percy's concerns, and in fact was an attempt to write a philosophical novel in the European tradition. It concerns Binx Bolling, a stockbroker in his early 30s who lives in a suburb of New Orleans called Gentilly. Binx awakens one morning, suddenly aware of the possibility of "a search." The search for what? It is never explicitly defined, only hinted at, and partly through the title. Binx lives in a world in which people are so disconnected from authentic existence they feel most real when they see some aspect of their lives reflected on the movie screen -- their neighborhood used as a set, for example. Or, as we experience it forty years later, to be "certified," as Percy put it, by being, ever so fleetingly, on television, or smiling out from your very own web page.

Percy says that we are more than that. In his NBA acceptance speech, he said his book was "a modern restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and created individual, as tshe phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim."

The wayfarer in two of Percy's most intriguing, comic, and visciously satirical novels - Love in the Ruins;The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World and The Thanatos Syndrome -- is Dr. Thomas More, a small town, unambitious psychiatrist, an admitted "bad Catholic" who says, "I believe in God and the whole business, but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellow man hardly at all."

In both novels More makes his wayfaring, pilgrim way through political, social and scientific force that are either tearing down society or trying to rebuild it (just as dangerous) in times he describes as "these dread later days of the old violent, beloved USA and of the Christ-forgetting, Christ-haunted death dealing Western World."

Percy's targets are the shallow pursuits of contemporary life that entertain us into a state of mass misery, and those who seek to raise us from the despair: Pop religionists who treat us as irrational, unembodied spirits, scientists and theoreticians who diagnose our ills in purely physical terms, and social planners who would solve human problems by eliminating human beings - the last being the particular subject of The Thanatos Syndrome, a book which I saw for the first time stacked on a display table at the 1984 National Right to Life Convention.

The battles Percy describes are fierce, comic, frightening and, one can't help reflecting, prophetic. Soemthing has gone very wrong, as we all admit when we are honest about what we see. We seem, simply put, to have forgotten who we are and why we were put here. We can thank Walker Percy, who left a challenging, fascinating body of work behind him when he passed away on May 10, 1990, for heroically diagnosing our ills and suggesting, however elliptically, a cure.

A couple of notes:

One of Percy's most difficult books is Lancelot. As I read it, I felt that I'd never hated a book (or simply a central character) more, and that this was truly the depths of whatever nihilistic side Percy harbored. Until the last word. I'm not kidding. Astonishing, and almost shocking - a novel in which the very last word of the novel gives shape and a profound moral dimension to the entire work. Now, don't ruin it for yourself, and run ahead and peek at the end before you read the whole thing. But do read it.

One of the prouder moments of my teaching career came a couple of years ago, when I was teaching a senior seminar in Honors Religion. I used (surprise, surprise), novels as a centerpoint of teaching during the second semester. Everyone had to read Silence and The Power and the Glory, then I gave them a list from which to pick to read a third. The girl who read Percy's Love in the Ruins was so jazzed by it that when her family took a trip to New Orleans during spring break, she insisted that that make a stop by the Maple Street Bookstore, one of Percy's haunts down there. She brought me postcards and everything - it was quite a nice moment. Quite rare, too.

Here's the best, most thorough Percy site on the web, run by the University of North Carolina: The Walker Percy Project

There are two biographies of Percy at present. This, I think is the better one.


Percy's essays are gathered in this excellent collection, which should be on your bookshelf alongside Flannery O'Connor's Mystery and Manners and The Habit of Being: Signposts in a Strange Land