One More Walker Percy

Percy only wrote a handful of books, so I'm trying to space out my reading of them so I don't run out of "first time" Percy reads. I plan to re-read some of them again, most notably The Moviegoer. I'm not so sure about this one, though I do strongly recommend it.

I had the happy coincidence in reading this book of picking back up with the narrator character from Love in the Ruins, an earlier Percy novel that I enjoyed for its straddling the boundaries between literary novel, Southern lit, and science fiction. That's a hard combination to pull off, but Percy has done it again in The Thanatos Syndrome. The narrator is several years older but his world isn't any better, and though his personal life has been for several years, it's coming apart again through some of the same old demons -- alcohol and the soulless science of the human body that is his profession. But what's being put into the water, and why would it have this curious effect on brain chemistry?

Wouldn't YOU like to know! (Said in my best 6th-grade-oral-book-report tone.)

I didn't really get The Moviegoer the first time through, which is why I need to read it again. I think I get at least the basic message of this novel, though -- science and the necessity of the possible have eaten away our souls, and even the heroes who would fight back are nearly engulfed in the emptiness themselves.

The Second Wave

Thirty-odd years ago, evangelical Protestants in the United States rediscovered classical Christian education, and today the national movement is in full swing, with hundreds of schools and, by now, thousands of young graduates. "In the beginning," so to speak, there was an essay by Dorothy Sayers, a book or two by Doug Wilson, and some conferences with a few hundred people. How far we've come, now that books like this one are being written, digested, critiqued and built upon by today's classical Christian schools. This book is a "second wave" work of the movement, grappling as it does with the limitations -- and even historical misunderstandings (gasp!) -- of the Dorothy Sayers essay that started so much. (On a bad day, a classical education enthusiast will quote Dorothy Sayers as if she were the final authority on education, when in fact she never saw herself that way at all and never had any idea her words would ignite an educational movement forty years later.)

If you're new to classical education, don't start with the books from twenty years ago; start with this one. If you've been around the movement a long time and feel like you really understand it already, you definitely need to read this book to have your original curiosity and drive for classical education reawakened. You need to be reminded that "classical" is not a system or set curriculum that can be perfected; rather, it is a body of knowledge and ideas and, to a lesser extent techniques (an important point these authors make) that gives an great foundation and starting place for education, but leaves a tremendous variety of options for implementation. So get back to work!