Walker Percy - The Last Gentleman

The same evening he called Kitty from a Dallas trailer park. To his vast relief, she sounded mainly solicitous for him. She had even supposed that he had been hurt and suffered another attack of “amnesia”—which he saw that she saw as a thing outside him, a magic medical entity, a dragon that might overtake him at any moment. Fortunately too, the events occurring that night on the campus were themselves so violent that his own lapse seemed minor.

“Oh, honey, I thought you’d been killed,” cried Kitty.

“No.”

“I couldn’t have met you anyway. They herded us down into the basement and wouldn’t let us leave till Sunday afternoon.”

“Sunday afternoon,” said the engineer vaguely.

“Are you all right?” asked Kitty anxiously when he fell silent.

“Yes. I’m going on now to find, ah, Jamie.”

“I know. We’re counting on you.”

“I wish you were here with me.”

“Me too.”

All of a sudden he did. Love pangs entered his heart and melted his loin and his life seemed simple. The thing to do — why couldn’t he remember it? — was to marry Kitty and get a job and live an ordinary life, play golf like other people.

“We will be married.”

“Oh yes, darling. Just between you and I, Myra is going to take the Mickle house off the market till you get back.”

“Between you and me,” he said absently, “the Mickle house?” Oh my. He’d forgotten Cap’n Andy and his lookout over the doleful plain.

“You two big dopes come on back here where you belong.”

“Who?”

“You and Jamie.”

“Oh yes. We will.”

“You shouldn’t have done it.”

“Done what?”

“Told Poppy to stop payment of my dowry.”

“Somebody stole it.”

“Then you’ll still accept it?”

“Sure.”

“He wrote me another one.”

“Good.”

But his foreboding returned as soon as he hung up. He lay abed stiff as a poker, feet sticking up, listening to patriotic programs. When at last he did fall asleep, he woke almost immediately and with a violent start. He peeped out of the window to see what might be amiss. Evil low-flying clouds reflected a red furnace-glow from the city. Lower still, from the very treetops, he fancied he could hear a ravening singing sound. Wasting no time, he uncoupled his umbilical connections with dread Dallas, roared out onto the freeways, and by sun-up was leveled out at eighty-five and straight for the Panhandle.

Past Amarillo the next day and up a black tundra-like country with snow fences and lonesome shacks to Raton Pass. He stopped for gas at an ancient Humble station, a hut set down in a moraine of oil cans and shredded fan belts and ruptured inner tubes. The wind came howling down from Colorado, roaring down the railroad cut like a freight train. There was a meniscus of snow on the black mountainside. The attendant wore an old sheepskin coat and was as slanty-eyed as a Chinaman. Later the engineer thought: why he is an Indian. He steered the Trav-L-Aire out onto a level stretch of tundra, locked himself in, and slept for twenty hours.

When he woke, it was very cold. He lit the propane panel ray and, as he waited for the cabin to warm, caught sight of his own name in Sutter’s casebook.

Barrett: His trouble is he wants to know what his trouble is. His “trouble,” he thinks, is a disorder of such a character that if only he can locate the right expert with the right psychology, the disorder can be set right and he can go about his business.

That is to say: he wishes to cling to his transcendence and to locate a fellow transcender (e.g., me) who will tell him how to traffic with immanence (e.g., “environment,” “groups,” “experience,” etc.) in such a way that he will be happy. Therefore I will tell him nothing. For even if I were “right,” his posture is self-defeating.

(Southern transcenders are the worst of all — for they hate the old bloody immanence of the South. Southerners outdo their teachers, just as the Chinese Marxists outdo the Soviets. Did you ever talk to a female Freudian Georgia social worker? Freud would be horrified.)

Yes, Barrett has caught a whiff of the transcendent trap and has got the wind up. But what can one tell him? What can you tell him, Val?

Even if you were right. Let us say you were right: that man is a wayfarer (i.e., not transcending being nor immanent being but wayfarer) who therefore stands in the way of hearing a piece of news which is of the utmost importance to him (i.e., his salvation) and which he had better attend to. So you say to him: Look, Barrett, your trouble is due not to a disorder of your organism but to the human condition, that you do well to be afraid and you do well to forget everything which does not pertain to your salvation. That is to say, your amnesia is not a symptom. So you say: Here is the piece of news you have been waiting for, and you tell him. What does Barrett do? He attends in that eager flattering way of his and at the end of it he might even say yes! But he will receive the news from his high seat of transcendence as one more item of psychology, throw it into his immanent meat-grinder, and wait to see if he feels better. He told me he’s in favor of the World’s Great Religions. What are you going to do about that?

I am not in favor of any such thing. We are doomed to the transcendence of abstraction and I choose the only reentry into the world which remains to us. What is better then than the beauty and the exaltation of the practice of transcendence (science and art) and of the delectation of immanence, the beauty and the exaltation of lewd love? What is better than this: one works hard during the day in the front line and with the comradeship of science and at night one goes to La Fonda, where one encounters a stranger, a handsome woman. We drink, we two handsome thirty-five-year-olds, she dark-eyed, shadowy of cheek, wistful in her own transcendence. We dance. The guitar makes the heart soar. We eat hearty. Under the table a gentle pressure of the knee. One speaks into her ear at some length. “Let’s go.” “But we ordered dinner.” “We can come back.” “All right.” The blood sings with voluptuousness and tenderness.

Rita says I do not love anyone. That is not true. I love all women. How lovable they are, all of them, our lovely lonely bemused American women. What darlings. Let any one of them enter a room and my heart melts. You say there is something better. Ich warte.

Where he probably goes wrong, mused the engineer sleepily, is in the extremity of his alternatives: God and not-God, getting under women’s dresses and blowing your brains out. Whereas and in fact my problem is how to live from one ordinary minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon.

Has not this been the case with all “religious” people?

Down, down into the sunny yellow canyon of the Rio Grande, down through the piney slopes to the ocher cliffs and the red clay bottoms. He stopped to see the famous river. When he came out of a fugue, he was in some ways like a sailor, horny and simple-minded, and with an itch to wander and see the sights, the famous places, take them in, dig every detail. But what a piddling little creek it was! A far cry from the Big Muddy: the trickle of whitish alkali water looked like the run-off from a construction site. Beside him a gold aspen rattled like foil in the sunlight. But there was no wind. He moved closer. A single leaf danced on its pedicle, mysteriously dispensed from energy laws.

Another Indian at a Phillips 66 station in Santa Fe directed him to Rancho la Merced, which he, the Indian, knew by name but not by owner. It meant leaving the highway south of the city and bumping across the desert, through scrubby junipers and fragrant piñon, up and down arroyos. Four times he had to dismount to open cattle gates.