Walker Percy and Purple Hair

Composing that poll the other day reminded me of a book that was once very important to me, Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. It's a very strange book, written as a series of questions, answers and hypothetical scenarios:

“Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are Johnny Carson and find yourself caught in an intolerable one-on-one conversation at a cocktail party from which there is no escape. Which of the two following events would you prefer to take place: (1) That the other person become more and more witty and charming, the music more beautiful, the scene transformed to a villa at Capri on the loveliest night of the year, while you find yourself more and more at a loss; or (2) that you are still in Beverly Hills and the chandeliers begin to rattle, a 7.5 Richter earthquake takes place, and presently you find yourself and the other person alive and well, and talking under a mound of rubble.
If your choice is (2), explain why it is possible for a true conversation to take place under the conditions of (2) but not (1).”

Walker Percy was an interesting guy, a Mississippi Southerner whose lineage included Civil War heroes and racist plantation owners turned politician with impressive mustachios. He had the Hemingway gene – his father, his mother and his grandfather all committed suicide.

His best friend was the historian Shelby Foote, and Percy and Foote both had enormous literary crushes on William Faulkner, so one day they decided to drive to Oxford to hunt the writer down. Faulkner was at home. Faulkner and Foote had an animated conversation while Percy cowered in the car.

Percy eventually went to Columbia Medical School – same time Jack Kerouak was there on a football scholarship. He contracted tuberculosis from performing an autopsy while interning at Bellvue, and was sent away to the famous Saranac Lake Sanatorium to recuperate. He lucked out – if he'd come down with the disease just a decade later, it could have been treated with antibiotics. Instead he got to spend three years in the strange, terroir-heavy reaches of the Adirondacks reading Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, and discovering that science really sucks. He decided to become a writer and a Roman Catholic instead.

I understand the appeal of Roman Catholicism by the way, though I don't swing that way myself. It's the old Lewis Carroll adage: Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.

Percy began writing, but was an extremely sl-o-o-o-ow writer, and didn't finish his first novel, The Moviegoer, until he was in his forties. It promptly won the National Book Award, beating out Catch 22 and Franny and Zooey. According to various post-game analyses, the award owed more to infighting between Heller and Salinger loyalists than to the literary merits of The Moviegoer.

I've read The Moviegoer. It was… okay. It's not as good as Catch 22, and of course, I think all of Salinger is dreadfully over-rated.

Can't remember how I ran into Lost in the Cosmos, but for years it was a touchstone, one of those books I carted around everywhere with me in my oversized purse, until I finally gave it to Tom while he was dying. I don't think Tom ever read it, though. He had other things on his mind.

In other news…

I dyed my hair a subtle but unmistakable purple yesterday, and woke up this morning with the thought: It all starts happening around the end of this month…

Who knows what that means.

My life so often feels to me like I've lived multiple versions of it before. Like the video game you've played a thousand times, and each time you crash and burn (predictably), but each time you get just a leetle bit farther… And each time you're so near to beating the damn thing.

I got a peculiar travel suggestion yesterday, which as Kurt Vonnegut tells us are dancing lessons from God. Peculiar travel suggestions have gotten me into a lot of trouble over the years, but they've also been the source of my deepest joys. Like I can still hear the muzzeins calling me to prayer through dusty motes of filtered sunlight in Cairo, a city so foreign to me that I actually felt as though was an antigen and the place was having an allergic reaction to me. A siren song, that muzzein's call to prayer – and unfortunately the strands that bind me to this reality have always been tenuous at best. I have to make them bind me. I often have to remind myself: This is real, this is important; this is not…