Walker Percy: The Second Coming

THE FIRST SIGN that something had gone wrong manifested itself while he was playing golf.

Or rather it was the first time he admitted to himself that something might be wrong.

For some time he had been feeling depressed without knowing why. In fact, he didn’t even realize he was depressed. Rather was it the world and life around him which seemed to grow more senseless and farcical with each passing day.

Then two odd incidents occurred on the golf course.

Once he fell down in a bunker. There was no discernible reason for his falling. One moment he was standing in the bunker with his sand-iron appraising the lie of his ball. The next he was lying flat on the ground. Lying there, cheek pressed against the earth, he noticed that things looked different from this unaccustomed position. A strange bird flew past. A cumulus cloud went towering thousands of feet into the air. Ordinarily he would not have given the cloud a second glance. But as he gazed at it from the bunker, it seemed to turn purple and gold at the bottom while the top went boiling up higher and higher like the cloud over Hiroshima. Another time, he sliced out-of-bounds, something he seldom did. As he searched for the ball deep in the woods, another odd thing happened to him. He heard something and the sound reminded him of an event that had happened a long time ago. It was the most important event in his life, yet he had managed until that moment to forget it.

Shortly afterwards, he became even more depressed. People seemed more farcical than ever. More than once he shook his head and, smiling ironically, said to himself: This is not for me.

Then it was that it occurred to him that he might shoot himself.

First, it was only a thought that popped into his head.

Next, it was an idea which he entertained ironically.

Finally, it was a course of action which he took seriously and decided to carry out.

The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people’s lives were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself? How did they manage to deceive themselves and even appear to live normally, work as usual, play golf, tell jokes, argue politics? Was he crazy or was it rather the case that other people went to any length to disguise from themselves the fact that their lives were farcical? He couldn’t decide.

What is one to make of such a person?

To begin with: though it was probably the case that he was ill and that it was his illness — depression — which made the world seem farcical, it is impossible to prove the case.

On the one hand, he was depressed.

On the other hand, the world is in fact farcical.

Or at least it is possible to make the case that for some time now life has seemed to become more senseless, even demented, with each passing year.

True, most people he knew seemed reasonably sane and happy. They played golf, kept busy, drank, talked, laughed, went to church, appeared to enjoy themselves, and in general were both successful and generous. Their talk made a sort of sense. They cracked jokes.

On the other hand, perhaps it is possible, especially in strange times such as these, for an entire people, or at least a majority, to deceive themselves into believing that things are going well when in fact they are not, when things are in fact farcical. Most Romans worked and played as usual while Rome fell about their ears.

But surely it is fair to say that when a man becomes depressed, falls down in a sand trap, and decides to shoot himself, something has gone wrong with the man, not the world.

If one person is depressed for every ninety-nine who are not or who say they are not, who is to say that the depressed person is right and the ninety-nine wrong, that they are deceiving themselves? Even if this were true, what good would it do to undeceive the ninety-nine who have diverted themselves with a busy round of work and play and so imagine themselves happy?

The argument is abstract and useless.

On the other hand, it is an undeniable fact that more people than ever are depressed nowadays. At last count, the symptom of depression outnumbered all other symptoms put together. What if the proportion of undepressed to depressed people changes from ninety-nine to one to fifty-fifty? Perhaps the argument will become less abstract.

At any rate and regardless of who was or who was not demented, something odd did happen to him on the golf course.

It happened in fact on the day after he had received the local Rotary’s man-of-the-year award for service to the community.

He and his partner, Dr. Vance Battle, were one down and two to go in the foursome. Number seventeen was a par-five medium-long dogleg with a good view of Sourwood Mountain, curving past a pond and a low ridge of red maples which in the brilliant sunlight looked like a tongue of fire searing the cool green fairway. It was not a difficult hole. Par golf required only that you hit two fair woods to clear the point of the ridge for an easy straightaway pitch to the green. His drive was well hit and went high in a strong following wind. It carried a good three hundred yards. His partner gave him a wink. The other players looked at each other. Though the ridge and the pond lay between him and the green, he decided to go for the flag. The instant he hit the ball with a three-wood, he knew it was all right. It drew slightly, enough to give the distance and to grab and hold the sloping green. Without seeing the ball, he knew he had a putt for an eagle.

His partner, Dr. Vance Battle, who sat in the cart on the outside of the dogleg waiting for his third shot, was watching. Vance looked at the green, looked back at him, held his hands apart as if he were measuring a fish, cocked his head, winked again and, though it could not be heard, gave his cluck tchk.

He looked down at the glossy brown club head. We used to call this club a spoon, he thought, not a three-wood. What do you think? he once asked an ancient black caddy at Sea Island. That’s a spoon shot, the caddy said with a certain emphasis and a rising cadence and handed him the club with the complex but clear sense of what a spoon could do.

Now you choose a numbered club from the back of an electric cart.

It was at that moment that he paused for several seconds, wood still held in both hands, fingers overlapped, and seemed to listen for something. He gazed up at the round one-eyed mountain, which seemed to gaze back with an ironical expression.

Certain “quasi-sensory” symptoms, as one doctor explained later, began to manifest themselves. There was a slight not unpleasant twisting sensation in his head. A pied weed at the edge of the rough gave off a faint but acrid smell which rose in his nostrils. The bright October sunlight went dark as an eclipse. The scene before his eyes seemed to change. It was not really a hallucination, he learned from another doctor, but an “association response” such as might be provoked by a lesion in the frontal lobe of the brain, the seat of memory.

The doctors did not agree on the nature of his illness or even if he had an illness.

Instead of the immaculate emerald fairway curving between the scarlet and gold hillsides of the Appalachians, he seemed to see something else. It was a scene from his youth, so insignificant a recollection that he had no reason to remember it then, let alone now thirty years later. Yet he seemed to see every detail as clearly as if the scene lay before him. Again the explanation of the neurologist was altogether reasonable. The brain registers and records every sensation, sight and sound and smell, it has ever received. If the neurones where such information is stored happen to be stimulated, jostled, pressed upon, any memory can be recaptured.