Many of you know that from 2000 to 2004, I taught Spanish at Greenville High School in Greenville, Mississippi as a member of the Mississippi Teacher Corps out of Ole Miss. It was a very challenging time during my life as you can imagine, but a very enlightening time as well. Greenville has been known as the Queen City of the Delta, a center for barges, tugboats, and cotton. Greenville High School is currently considered a critical needs school where many students struggle academically and where there are a lot of discipline problems. Greenville is also a city of high unemployment and extreme poverty that has been losing population rapidly in recent years. The high school, at one time, was one of the most prestigious in the state. Shelby Foote, one of the most respected Civil War historians, grew up in Greenville and attended Greenville High School. One of his classmates and one of his lifelong friends was Walker Percy Percy, a convert to Catholicism, became an acclaimed novelist and Catholic philosopher. Percy’s father committed suicide when he was 13 years old. His mother died in a car accident in a suspect suicide near Leland, Mississippi. Percy and his younger brothers were taken in by a relative, William Alexander Percy, and raised at the Percy estate in Greenville. The Moviegoer, Percy’s acclaimed existentialist novel set in New Orleans, won the National Book Award in 1962. The Moviegoer is one of my favorite books, one that I read again and again. The search for meaning is an important theme of The Moviegoer and in much of Percy’s books. Here is a quote of his from The Moviegoer: “What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a cast away do? Why he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” Walker Percy is a national treasure, that is for sure, and one of the community of saints whom I respect dearly, even though he has not been officially canonized, though he may be one day. Percy died on May 10, 1990 at the age of 73 in Covington, Louisiana. Being an oblate of the Benedictine monastery in Covington, he is buried in the cemetery there.
Below is an interesting short video about Walker Percy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXEQFWd848s
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