LAST CALL: What Is It Now, Pilgrim?
Hillyer, Quin
LAST CALL QLII N H]LLYER What Is It Now, Pilgrim? HIS BEING MAY, and bad puns being a vice of mine, I am reminded of one of the old, standard jokes of school children: "IfApril showers bring...
...In Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy, biographer Jay Tolson writes: "At issue in Percy's plumbing of the soul's restlessness is a large question: Is there an individual, irreducible self that is worth saving...
...74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2006...
...The answer, of course, is Pilgrims...
...At the moment the fictional Dr...
...More writes that "I believe in God and the whole business but I love women best, music and science next, whiskey next, God fourth, and my fellowman hardly at all...
...So it is that Dr...
...What larger social good is to be served by paying attention to this particular individual, when there are so many societal problemssuch as "liberal anxiety" and "conservative rage and large-bowel complaints"-just out there waiting to be the rape utically cauterized...
...Here he is, watching the death of New Orleans and the splintering of an American nation where the center clearly did not hold, yet he can't decide if saving the world is of more importance than his own potential Nobel Prize...
...But a pilgrimage that involves waiting and working and that ends up, with God, back home with the family you love-now that's the kind of pilgrimage that makes sense and joy, a joy every bit as bright as the flowers of May...
...Pilgrimages to Fatima traditionally begin each year in May as well...
...Quin Hillyer is executive editor of The American Spectator...
...Catholic tradition calls for pilgrimages to Marian shrines during the month of May, and Pope Benedict XVI will begin the month with a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Divine Love, just south of Rome...
...And May 1 is the Celtic feast day of a saint named Asaph, a pilgrim of the Lord whose travels led him to Wales, where he became the first bishop of a new See-and where somehow he gained enough fame to earn the honor of having named after him in Alexandria, Virginia, a street that runs half a block from my new apartment...
...More goes to a priest for confession, and leaves the confession wearing sackcloth and ashes...
...And, if so, how best to preserve it in an age that reduces the self to a problem that is to be solved by one or another therapeutic regime or else subsumed under some progressive ideal of a larger social good...
...But sovereignty--over one's own choices, own goals, own actions and loves-goes only so far, is only good for this temporal existence...
...Sound familiar...
...He begins Love in the Ruins holed up in a deserted motel outside of New Orleans in the "dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A...
...broken out in hives and waiting for the end of the world...
...Yet this drunk, sinning semi-believer, this crazed sojourner at an abandoned Howard Johnson's, is capable of wisdom...
...Then, as the book ends, he goes home to his wife, whom he loves-where, Percy tells us, "all good folk belong...
...If you want and wait and work, you can have...
...Pronouncing himself a "bad" Roman Catholic, Dr...
...One of my two favorite Percy characters, Dr...
...Thomas More, is a scientist who thinks he has made a world-changing discovery...
...HIS BEING MAY, and bad puns being a vice of mine, I am reminded of one of the old, standard jokes of school children: "IfApril showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring...
...More writes, the president is preparing to speak in New Orleans, calling for unity amidst disaster and armed violence...
...And yet foremost on More's mind, vain scientist that he is, is the question: "Which prospect is more unpleasant, the destruction of the world, or that the destruction may come before my achievement can be made known...
...Now does this lapsed Catholic sound like a self worth saving...
...Maybe it's fitting, then, that the American author most associated with the idea of men as spiritual pilgrims, Walker Percy, both was born and died in May (May 18, 1916, and May 10, i990...
...Perhaps that word play is appropriate, because May is a big month for pilgrimages to various shrines for Buddhists, Hindus, and, not least, Catholics...
...Well, unlike Walker Percy, I'm not (quite) Catholic, and I've never gone to private confession or worn sackcloth...
...All any man needs," he writes towards the end, "is time and desire and the sense of his own sovereignty...
...Many of Percy's characters were a little "touched," as we say in the South-their minds a bit askew from the "normal," their perceptions of everyday life unencumbered by ordinary social conventions...
Vol. 39 • May 2006 • No. 4
