The following excerpt is from author Walker Percy’s penultimate novel, The Second Coming. It is part of a much longer letter written by protagonist Will Barrett to a lifelong confidant as Barrett prepares to prove the existence or nonexistence of God by going, unannounced and without food, to a secret cave to wait and see if he is rescued.
I have made some slight revisions.
My quarrel with others can be summed up as a growing disgust with two classes of people. These two classes between them exhaust the class of people in general. That is to say, there are only two classes of people, the believers and the unbelievers. The only difficulty is deciding which is the more feckless.
My belated discovery of the bankruptcy of both classes has made it possible for me to take action. Better late than never.
Take Christians. I am surrounded by Christians. They are generally speaking a pleasant and agreeable lot, not noticeably different from other people—even though they, the Christians of the South, of the U.S.A., the Western world have killed off more people in recent centuries than all other people put together. Yet I cannot be sure they don’t have the truth. But if they have the truth, why is it the case that they are repellant precisely to the degree that they embrace and advertise that truth? . . . A mystery: If the good news is true, why is not one pleased to hear it? And if the good news is true, why are its public proclaimers such bungholes and the proclamation itself such a weary used-up thing?
. . . As unacceptable as believers are, unbelievers are even worse, not because of the unacceptability of unbelief but because of the nature of the unbelievers themselves who in the profession and practice of their unbelief are even greater bungholes than the Christians.
The present-day unbeliever is a greater bunghole than the present-day Christian because of the fatuity, blandness, incoherence, fakery, and fat-headedness of her unbelief. She is in fact an insane person. If God does in fact exist, the present-day unbeliever will no doubt be forgiven because of her manifest madness.
The present-day Christian is either lazy, nominal, lukewarm, hypocritical, sinful or, if fervent, generally offensive and fanatical. But he is not crazy.
The present-day unbeliever is crazy as well as being a bunghole—which is why I say she is a bigger bunghole than the Christian because a crazy bunghole is worse than a sane bunghole.
The present-day unbeliever is crazy because he finds himself born into a world of endless wonders, having no notion of how he got here, a world in which he eats, sleeps, craps, screws, works, grows old, gets sick, and dies, and is quite content to have it so. Not once in his entire life does it cross his mind to say to himself that his situation is preposterous, that an explanation is due him and to demand such an explanation and to refuse to play out another act of the farce until an explanation is forthcoming. No, he takes his comfort and ease, plays along with the game, watches TV, drinks his drink, laughs, curses politicians, and now and again to relieve the boredom and the farce (of which he is dimly aware) goes off to war to shoot other people—for all the world as if his prostrate were not growing cancerous, his arteries turning to chalk, his brain cells dying off by the millions, as if the worms were not going to have him in no time at all.
On the contrary, the more intelligent she is, the crazier she is and the bigger a bunghole she is. She becomes a professor and forms an interdisciplinary group. She reads Dante for its mythic structure. She joins the A.C.L.U. and concerns herself with the freedom of the individual and does not once exercise her own freedom to inquire into how in God’s name she should find herself in such a ludicrous situation as being born in Brooklyn, living and Manhattan, and being buried in Queens. She is as insane as a French intellectual.
It has taken me all these years to make the simplest discovery: that I am surrounded by two classes of maniacs. The first are the believers, who think they know the reason why we find ourselves in this ludicrous predicament yet act for all the world as if they don’t. The second are the unbelievers, who don’t know the reason and don’t care if they don’t.
The rest of my life, which will be short, shall be devoted to a search for a third alternative, a tertium quid—if there is one. If not, we are stuck with the two alternatives: (1) believers, who are intolerable, and (2) unbelievers, who are insane.
Percy, Walker. The Second Coming. New York: Pocket Books, 1980. 218-221.
The newborn’s eyes emitted no tears; her mouth held no wails. In fact, she exited her mother’s birth canal speaking. All she said, as she looked up at the doctor’s surprised face, was “Please, put me back.”
Life was never new to her. She had only to be told once what something was or did and she knew. Actually, she knew before she was told.
Her self was no mystery to her either. She knew how she would react or speak before she ever did or said.
No one could ever teach her anything because she already knew.
She could teach nothing because she already knew.
I, on the other hand, was not so fortunate as our made-up female. I was conceived and born, through no conscious choice of my own, into a world which I did not create or understand. For quite a long time, I did not even know where I ended and it started.
As my body and brain grew, my mind began to expand. In the beginning, I took the world at face value. Things around me were the way they were because they were the way they were. If I didn’t understand something, I asked someone or I watched someone and I accepted their answer or their action. Or else I made up my own answer or action. Or else I became angry and frustrated and I cried and raged and then I felt better, or at least I was too tired to question for a while.
It astounds me how quickly I accept what I’m fed. It astounds me how quickly I can distract myself when answers don’t come easily.
As Edie Brickell sang so eloquently earlier, “I know what I know, if you know what I mean.”
I was content to be fed. I learned the language; I learned the alphabet; all the while, I learned the culture. It was a good culture because it was the only one I knew. You have to like your only alternative, right? What choice do you have?
One day, the question of questions struck me like a hammer between the eyes and stopped me dead in my tracks:
Why this way and not some other way?
Why this way and not some other way?
Thus ended my first naivete.
I was left, it seemed, two choices: rebel or acquiesce.
I chose to rebel. I wore black. I cut my hair funny. I swore. I talked back. I listened to aggressive music, read aggressive books, watched aggressive movies and did aggressive things.
Maybe you also rebelled.
Or maybe you joined the system, became part of the machine. Maybe you fit in, excelled in school, excelled at sports or extracurricular activities. Maybe you sought to make the world a better place by virtue of your sheer, exemplary excellence.
In both cases, we were convinced our way was the right and best way. We were convinced that the machine was unavoidable, either a menace or a miracle, but fully and forever in the way.
We both were wrong.
What woke you up? What snapped you out of your cultural daydreaming?
For me, it was death.
People around me, people close to me, died, and there was nothing I could do about it. More immediately, I realized I had to die. I was not immune to the ravages of sickness and time. I was not, it turned out, immortal.
Have you ever noticed that it is around this time that many in our culture find or return to Jesus? Or buy something expensive? Or change jobs? Or change partners? Or make or adopt a baby?
It astounds me how quickly we can distract ourselves when answers don’t come easily.
I turned to Jesus. For a while, he was just all right with me, but then the nagging question returned, cornering me when I least expected it: Why this way and not some other way?
Christianity was too easy.
So, unfortunately, was the only seeming alternative, atheism.
According to author Walker Percy, writing as Will Barrett in a would-be suicide note,
...the present-day unbeliever is crazy precisely because she finds herself born into a world of endless wonders, having no notion of how she got here, a world in which she eats, sleeps, craps, screws, grows old, gets sick, and dies, and is quite content to have it so. Not once in her life does it cross her mind to say to herself that her situation is preposterous, that an explanation is due her and to demand such an explanation and to refuse to play out another act of the farce until an explanation is forthcoming. No, she takes her comfort and ease, plays along with the game, watches TV, drinks her drink, laughs, curses politicians, and now and again to relieve the boredom and the farce (of which she is dimly aware) goes off to war to shoot other people—for all the world as if her breasts were not growing cancerous, her arteries turning to chalk, her brain cells dying off by the millions, as if the worms were not going to have her in no time at all (Percy 219-220).
Perhaps we have constructed the machine in part to protect us from our fate and our nature. I will die. I would kill. Instead, though, pass me a brownie and turn on the news.
It astounds me how quickly we can distract ourselves when answers don’t come easily.
I began working for Hospice and meditating at about the same time. As I learned to accept and thus still the voices in my monkey mind, I met, counseled and was counseled by people whose depth of pain, peace and passion surpassed my wildest imaginings.
You do not know how deeply you can care for another human being until you ride along with him to the place where he is going to die. He asks you to help him with the hospital paperwork, and you do, even though that really isn’t in your job description. His family comes to visit and you watch them stare out the window, at the floor, anywhere but at him as he struggles for breath.
You return a week later and he is now unable to speak. His mouth is dry and you give him some water. Uneaten trays of food are stacked next to him. His face is covered with uncustomary stubble. He fingernails need to be cut.
You look for a nurse to get his body taken care of and the revolting food taken away. You look for the dietician to get some of his favorite, cottage cheese. She doesn’t understand why he won’t eat more until she enters his room and looks at him. Without hesitating, she begins to sing a hymn. She also gets him some cottage cheese.
He later dies surrounded by hymn-singing nurses. Can you imagine?
I learned more in the presence of the sick and dying than I read in any book while in seminary. On good days, my monkey mind would shut up completely and life, not death, would slap me in the face. Life, not death, would look me in the eye or take me by the hand and it would say, “This, too, is good.”
The Hospice nurses had a characteristic way of describing patients’ mental states. The patients were “alert and oriented” times one, two or three. You and I, hopefully, are alert and oriented times three, aware of self, place and time. Sometimes, only two of these three levels of awareness are present: someone is aware of time and place, or time and self or self and place, but something is clearly missing. Finally, toward the end of life, as patients succumb to Alzheimer’s or actively die, they are said to be alert and oriented times one, aware only of self.
We begin, then, unaware, and we also seem to end unaware. How often do we spend our middle unaware? How often do we also spend our middle unaware?
This is the place in my sermon where I would love to tell you the secret of self and other awareness. I would love to give you slogan, a catchphrase or three easy steps. I would love to be the answer-giver, the light caster, the rabbi.
I can’t, though. The most I can say is that the search for an explanation, the “why this way and not some other way?” that haunts my waking and my sleeping life, is dangerous and scary and frustrating. It will take you to the edge of sanity. It will stretch you in ways unimaginable. It will sometimes hurt you and the people you love.
But consider the alternatives. You can always fixate on the machine. You can become either a cog or a monkey wrench, in both cases spinning or jamming endlessly because there is always room for more cogs and more monkey wrenches in society.
Or you can wish you were born already aware, like the girl who began our musings, but how boring is that? To never be able to learn or teach, to never experience the thrill of deeper connection, of deeper awareness, that comes with the struggle—to be always/already instantly—to never be surprised by joy or sorrow—you can count me out.
I will continue to look within and without. I will continue to be still. I will continue to seek without finding because, I suddenly realize, I have stumbled upon one maxim:
Until we are truly aware, we can’t truly act.
Until we are truly aware, we can’t truly act.
Until we are truly aware...we can’t truly act.
I have discovered that a right action, an action that cuts through space and time, an action that cuts through conformity and nonconformity, is worth a thousand words. It’s too bad it took so many words for me to realize this.