| Author Quoted | Walker Percy |
| Title Quoted | Moviegoer |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1964/02/11 |
| Imprint | [S.l.] : [s.n.]. 1961 |
| Quotation | Have you read a book by a man called Walker Percy, called The Movie Goer? I don't read enough novels to judge, but I think this is a good one. You think at first he is making this Movie Goer a supreme dope of some sort for going to so many movies, but in the end it turns out that he is the only smart one, in a wild existentialist kind of way, and the best thing about the book is that in the end nobody says who is supposed to be right anyway. I think it is very important at this juncture that novels should not insist that somebody is right. Because when somebody is right, then someone else is wrong, and this gets us forgetting that we are all wrong, or, in some sense, right. The thing is to see that unless we know we are wrong we cannot be right, because the only thing we can successfully be right about is the fact that we are all wrong. The one incontrovertible fact of human life. When one starts from that one, however, the rest begins to make sense. Hence there is no justification for consoling religions. I mean the kind that think they can console by saying everything is all right. But I am not propounding the idea that everything is all wrong, as a source of religious consolation. It is just a fact, not consoling. Anyway, in The Movie Goer, besides a lot of intriguing New Orleans names, there is a Mardi Gras to which nobody goes. The author of the book has written well about Kierkegaard somewhere too. |
| Quotation Source | The Road to Joy: Letters to New and Old Friends.; Edited by Robert E. Daggy. / [S.l.] : Flame. 1990, p. 47 |
| Letter to | Mark Van Doren |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
(If there is a link above showing up as a number, click it to open another window with a full text version.) |