And Yet . . .

Shelby Foote on the left and Walker Percy on the right. 

I read Proust in college, but it has taken reading the letters of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy to make me want to go back and read him again. 

Certainly a complicated man, homosexual, liberal yet anti-socialsim, anti-Catholic–though raised Catholic–an atheist, yet very complimentary of the Christians who were willing to speak up for the poor and middle-class and go against the Church’s power. He was against the absolishment of the clergy as he felt that there were many good and honest monks/priests, and that there were as many “scoundrel” secular people as religious ones. 

A novelist, essayist and literary critic. As I said a complicated man. When his father insisted that he get a job, he obtained a volunteer position at the famous french library, the Bibliotheque Mazarine. Immediately after, he took sick leave and never worked there (or anywhere for that matter) a day of his life, although he continued on their roster as staff. This makes me laugh: Proust working both familial and societal systems to his advantage. 

What he was more than anything, was a writer and it is as a writer that he comes up so often in the letters between Foote and Percy. Friends since highschool, they were very close. Even after they were both married and living in different cities–the time when most friendships ebb away–they kept up a lively correspondence their whole lives. Foote was critical of Percy’s conversion to Catholicism. 

He thought it would make Percy less curious about the world, that he would lose the edge that comes with doubt. Time has shown that Foote need not have worried. Percy was a true seeker and his belief in God was fueled by his doubts and curiosity. Foote was a seeker too, it should be said. He was not anti-God as much as he was anti-organized religion. 

The following quote is a bit of a mish-mash. It’s part of a letter from Foote to Percy in November of 1949. In the letter Foote quotes Proust paraphrasing Pascal. Ha. The quote goes like this: “True literature reveals the still unknown part of the soul. It is more or less the saying of Pascal that I quote, wrongly, for I have no books here. ‘A little knowledge separates [us] from God; much knowledge brings us back.’ One should never be afraid to go too far, for the truth is beyond.” 

This reminds me of the silly, yet statistically true adage that christian kids enter college as believers and graduate four years later as atheists or agnostics. 

The effects of a little knowledge: whereby we question what we had been raised to believe but mistakenly believe that that settles it, we can go on our merry way, live our lives having settled that there is nothing beyond, bereft of a spirituality based in reality. (I use the phrase, a spirituality based on reality to differate between a fuzzy-thinking spirituality that promotes a vaugue sense of well-being with no thought as to its implications or origins or end.) 

In this case, we haven’t learned anything about the nature of learning, of knowing, not just what we know but of knowing what we do not know. We neglect to question the questioning, to venture past post-Sundayschool, church camp indoctrination to seek a Truth that invites curiosity and doubt and wonder and most of all a Truth that incompasses all experience, not just empirical, or cultural, or religious of any ilk. 

Which circles back to a previous post whereby I quoted Percy’s main character in The Movie Goer, and which I repeat here as it is annoying to send readers zipping to past posts to find the exact words: “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 castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn’t miss a trick. To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be on to something. Not to be on to something is to be in despair.”