The Quad – Fall 2014

1

he T Fall 2014

uad Q

Grove City College

2

Editors’ Note

The Quad Senior Editor John Gordon Junior Editor Laura Egan Department Editors Rachel Pullen (Creative Nonfiction) Nick Hiner (Poetry) Luke Sayers (Essays) Blake Denlinger (Book Reviews) Taryn Cole (Short Stories) Assistant Editors Adeline Fergusen (Creative Nonfiction) John Hermesmann (Poetry) Alicia Pollard (Poetry) Daniel Rzewnicki (Short Stories) Julia Connors (Book Reviews) Daniel Chapman (Essays) Art Director Rebekah Fry Art Director’s Assistants Jenna Hershberger Laura Post Design and Layout Editor Abby Cliff Style Chief Laura Storrs Copy-Editors Bethany Wilson Liz Kruizenga John Anastasio Agnes YunFei Tan Rachel Reitz Grant Wishard Peter Riley Distribution Chief Mary Leone Conundrums Tucker Sigourney Marketing Director Mia McMahon Faculty Advisor Dr. H. Collin Messer Editorial Advisory Board Dr. Joseph D. Augspurger, Dr. Daniel S. Brown, Dr. James G. Dixon III, Dr. Joshua F. Drake, Dr. Michael F. Falcetta, Dr. Gillis J. Harp, Dr. Charles E. Kriley, Dr. Julie C. Moeller, Dr. ­Jennifer A. Scott, Dr. Kevin S. Seybold Cover Art Richard Christman

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about…As for authenticity, we are dying for it amidst all the fakery and fragmentation. It’s a reason to read, a reason to write, and directs every decision about subject and style.

-W.H. Auden In his plea for authenticity, Auden gives us a reason to read and write truthfully.

We tame the bit of truth we have to make it more appealing, to make it more clever for cleverness’ sake, to find a way around instead of going through the middle. Yet we respect the real we see in others, and their courage to speak out. But this honesty is difficult. We can sometimes only learn to “get the better of words,” as they shift and change and slip just out of reach. With Auden’s encouragement, we can understand that the pursuit of authenticity is noble regardless of the struggle. We would like the Quad to be a hospitable place where students and faculty can share their bits of truth in a genuine and creative way.

In this issue, you’ll find a smattering of book reviews, from Grayson Quay’s exploration of The Paris Wife and Z, two books that attempt to catalogue the significant others of two of literature’s best expatriates, to Dalton Bowser’s “Thinking for the Glory of God,” which probes John Piper’s Think, debating the relationship between Christianity and intellect. In Julia Connors’ poem “Stranger,” she tackles our minuscule stature on a cosmic scale, and Tucker Sigourney weighs the choice of a philosophical “leap” in his poem of the same name. These selections are just a few of the many great entries in this issue of the Quad.

As we look forward to another year of publication, the editors would like to thank all of the authors who submitted pieces, as well as our tireless staff and section editors, whose work has brought the magazine to the incarnation you hold and your hands right now. We are thankful, as always, for our readers, to whom we now hand off the completed magazine, in hopes that they will find enjoyment and comfort in its contents.

John Gordon Senior Editor

Laura Egan Junior Editor

Volume 7, Issue 1, Fall 2014 The Quad is published quarterly by students of Grove City College and funded by the college. The works in this magazine, however, do not necessarily represent the views of Grove City College, the editors, the advisor, or the editorial advisory board. The editors are responsible for the selection of articles; responsibility for opinions and accuracy of facts in articles published rests solely with the individual authors. The Quad grants permission for any original article to be photocopied for local use, provided that no more than 1,000 copies are made, are distributed at no cost, and The Quad is properly cited as the source.

Anyone may submit to The Quad. Pieces are selected by a blind submission process. Submissions must be sent to quad.submissions@gmail.com. Include what department you are submitting to, year, campus mailbox number (or address) with your name and use 12 pt Times New Roman font, double spaced; when citations are necessary, use Chicago style. Any rejected submissions which are not returned will be destroyed. Accepted submissions may be withdrawn at any time. Anyone interested in writing a review should contact the editors.

The Quad is available online at www2.gcc.edu/orgs/TheQuad

The Quad | F

all

2014

VOLUME 7 ISSUE 1

Contents 4

If Eyes Could Hold the Ocean, Dear

Anna Mittleman

Poem

5

Four Signs that You’re Getting Older

Dr. Dann Brown

Essay

7

Stranger

Julia Connors

Poem

8

And the Women Who Loved Them

Grayson Quay

Book Review

11

Excerpt from Mickey and Bobbi: The Orions Off Broad Street

Alice Hodgkins

Excerpt

16

Bondage

Angell Fonner

Poem

18

Walker Percy’s American Apocalypse

Dr. Collin Messer

Book Review

22

The Leap

Tucker Sigourney

Poem

23

Thinking for the Glory of God

Dalton Bowser

Conundrums The Viking Conundricles, Part One: The Cargo Master

Book Review

4

If Eyes Could Hold the Ocean, Dear Anna Mittleman If eyes could hold the ocean, dear I’d sail away in yours, Abandon sheet to windy sighs, Toss overboard the oars.

If hands could hold a country, dear, I’d get quite lost in yours, Commit to heart your palm-line map, Explore each fingertip’s shore.

If a mouth could hold the sky, my dear I’d track your smile’s ellipse, Breathe in the gusts of your sweet voice, And kiss your cloudy lips.

And if a touch could light a fire, I’d feed the flames with care.

To feel your hand upon my skin Would burn a city bare.

Anna Mittelman (’15) thinks the world would be a better place without Sketchers

There are Four Signs That You’re Getting Older

5

Dr. Dann Brown

F

irst, you start repeating things. Next you find yourself forgetting things. Third, you start to repeat things. And try as I might, I cannot recall the fourth.

I recited that old, sad joke for many years. I probably started sharing it at my parents’ expense when I was in my 20s and they were in their 50s. Great. Now I’m in my 50s, and my folks aren’t around to hear me repeating the joke. Not that they’d remember that I used to make the joke in the first place. A few days ago I turned 55. I had noted in my datebook that my wife and I would be celebrating my “55 limit day.” And it was limited. We had a lovely evening out. No dancing or drinking of caffeinated beverages was allowed because it was a school night. Neither of us could finish our dinners, so we packaged up doggie bags for lunch the next day. Garlic potatoes at the office, warmed up in the common microwave may not appeal to the youngsters, but we 55 year olds really enjoy them, I discovered.

On Monday I turned 55. On Tuesday I realized I’m now closer to being 60 than I am to being 50. I am not thrilled, but it beats the alternative: a premature death. I set my mind to being positive. After all, “No one can avoid aging,” Katharine Graham said, “but aging productively is something else.” I need that something else. I think we all do. I must, simply must, find an affirming space in which

3. I’m getting closer to sitting in the front row at graduation and baccalaureate.

4. I qualify for Senior Discounts throughout the city.

5. Regardless of anyone else’s age, it is appropriate to address me as “Sir.” 6. I am eligible to purchase a home in a gated condo community.

7. I can now shout “Hey, you kids, stay off this lawn,” and nobody calls the police to complain.

8. Students – both men and women! – hold doors open for me.

9. My suits are all classics now.

10. I’m more comfortable with myself than I

ever have been.

This is the good news. It all changed when I posted the list online. Ten simple statements. I didn’t expect them to receive nearly 75 likes and over 20 comments. The majority of my friends checking in on the list were, interestingly enough, younger than I am. Most were in their 20s or 30s.

Guess what. They thought the list was hilarious. We’ll see if they think it’s funny when they’re 55 and limited. Let’s

to live my own alternative to death. Don’t misunderstand me. Aging does have its advantages.

Here in no particular order are some of the benefits to being an aging college professor, who hopes to meet Mrs. Graham’s definition of “productive.”

1. I am older than almost all of my undergrads’ parents. Gravitas.

2. I am the senior faculty member in my department. People bring me coffee. (They don’t really, but I slid this into the list hop ing that they would start bringing me coffee after reading this.)

wait to see if they even remember it. I think they’ll find the list educational, not hilarious, when they’re my age.

What happened the next day was a greater surprise.

My older friends started to post their thoughts and comments. “Wait until you’re closer to 80 than to 50 years old,” wrote one. Another colleague wrote, “You’re just a young whippersnapper.” I replied that “I don’t have as much snap in my whip as I used to.”

This reflection on life, aging, friendship, and memories moved me beyond the list of silly (except for the coffee brought to me) platitudes connected with growing older. I wanted to think hard about aging. I wanted

6

to feel deeply about my own mortality. And I wanted to understand how each of us can be more productive as we age. From freshman year to senior year, we learn. Likewise, from teen years to elder years, we learn. How might we plan to age productively? Aside from the obvious “take-away” as the kids are calling it these days—that being that my older friends are more active on social media in the morning hours and my younger are active in the evening—I have uncovered a series of truths throughout my life that I now entrust to you my younger and older readers. May these lead you into a productive old age.

1. Laughter is for everyone: young, old, male, female, boss, worker, Christian, Muslim, and Jew. 2. Ugliness is more than skin-deep. If some one acts ugly, they probably are ugly inside.

3. Beauty if superficial most days. Make-up and cleansing scrubs are amoral, covering both the good and the bad.

4. God works through everyone—even me sometimes. Even through you at times.

5. Writing is therapeutic. This is always true for the writer, but only occasionally true for the reader.

6. Walking makes my knees ache. It makes my heart stronger, too, but only so I can

Fall 2014

have achey knees for extra years.

7. Passports should always be current. Even Canada wants to know where you’ve been.

8. After you finish college, you will never, ever again be able to walk into a lecture event or concert hall two minutes before curtain and find a seat. Take advantage of what is given to you.

9. Love people who are older than you are, but invest in people who are younger than you are whether they love you or not. The generation growing up behind you will shape God’s world for better or for worse.

10. Be comfortable with yourself. Know who you are. Know whom belongs to you.

Know who you belong to.

Should I be called upon to condense even this list, I might summarize for you my Weltanschauung: Love God, love His creation, and love His creation’s creation. Now. On toward 60. Productively.Q

Daniel S. Brown is a professor of communication studies in the Department of Communication and Visual Art. His loves of coffee and elephants are well documented in social media outlets. He and his wife, Susan, live in Grove City at the home of their dog, Isabella Marie.

7

Stranger Julia Connors Tame me and take me away to where a tiny star becomes a caress.

Bend me and break me away to where a moonbeam becomes an address.

I’m ready to say my goodbyes and I am writing my name with a marker.

Nothing exists but surprise and I am wild and scared in my parka.

Julia Connors (’14) will be ready for an adventure when she brings her parka back after Fall Break.

8

And the Women Who Loved Them T Grayson Quay

he Paris Wife and Z are not biographies recounting rapidly aging with no prospects ahead of her beyond living two doomed marriages of the Lost Generation, but out her days as a spinster in her sister’s attic. By choosing to are rather fascinating historical romance novels. Thanks become involved with Hemingway, she forsakes everything to the meticulous research undertaken by McClain and she knows to forge ahead into an unknown future.

Fowler, they breathe life into the near-mythic figures of McClain’s greatest success with The Paris Wife is the way Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald while revealing in which she frames Hadley’s story in light of Hemingway’s their comparatively lesser-known wives as artistic concerns and those of the Moderncompelling characters in their own right. ist movement as a whole. Upon arriving The Paris Wife: A Novel, The cliché that “behind every man is in Paris, Hadley is struck by the number Paula Mclain. Ballantine a great woman” is fertile ground for the of artists and writers who have abandoned Books; 2012. 352 pages. imagination. This is not to imply that monogamy. She reflects that “[n]ot every$15.00 Paperback. these novels are nothing more than an one believed in marriage then” because excuse for well-read soccer moms to insert “to marry was to say . . . that history and Z: A Novel of Zelda themselves into the role of muse and lover tradition and hope could stay knit together Fitzgerald. St. Martin’s to sexy literary bad boys like Hemingway to hold you up.” Such a statement of faith Griffin; 2014. 400 pages. and Fitzgerald. This isn’t Nicholas Sparks was almost unthinkable in a time when $15.99 Paperback. for the lonely English major. Instead, we’re everything worth believing in seemed to led to ponder more serious sides of the have died on the battlefields of World War question, like how such a spouse can be supportive without One. Although they stay married for seven years, Ernest being completely subsumed and whether any marriage can and Hadley’s marriage is ultimately doomed by Ernest’s survive the perilous climb to greatness. inability to believe that history, tradition, and hope—the It’s also been said that people get married because very things in which Hadley places her faith—could sustain they feel the need to have a witness to their lives, and these it. As Ernest’s infidelity tears the marriage apart, McClain books stand as admirable attempts to portray just what skillfully communicates Hadley’s grief and we mourn with Hadley and Zelda, as the most intimate observers of their her for the dissolution of something truly valuable. husbands’ lives, witnessed during their marriages.

Ernest himself is portrayed in a way that goes beyond When mutual friends introduce twenty-eight-year-old the legendary macho persona and reveals the deeply Hadley Richardson to twenty-one-year-old Ernest Heming- scarred young man who keeps a journal of possible suicide way at a party in Chicago, their mutual attraction is as methods and cannot sleep without a light on. McClain obvious as their seeming incompatibility. In addition to even presents a few brief passages from Hemingway’s point their substantial age difference, Hadley’s old-fashioned of view and, although she claims that she was attempting tastes clash with Hemingway’s staunch modernism. She no such thing, she clearly emulates Hemingway’s sparse, reads Henry James, wears her hair long, and plays classical declarative style. This is especially evident in passages such piano, all of which contribute to her description of herself as this one, in which Hemingway is sent to report on the as being “closer to a Victorian holdout than a flapper.”

Greco-Turkish War and encounters desperate refugees: At the same time, Hadley is ripe for a drastic break with “The children carry what they can and cry when they get the past. After a childhood marred by tragedy—her father too tired or scared. Everyone’s scared and wet and the rain committed suicide and her sister died from burns—and a keeps coming.” constricting, overprotective mother, Hadley finds herself This assignment draws Hemingway back into the

The Quad

despair he felt during World War One and he sleeps with a local woman because “it makes him feel that he won’t die, at least for tonight.” Later in the novel, when their marriage has fallen apart, a friend remarks that Ernest and Hadley seemed “lassoed to some higher thing,” but to Ernest, Hadley could never be more than what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion.” Ernest’s disillusionment leaves him without any transcendent object to look to and everyone and everything becomes nothing more than a distraction. He keeps this creeping despair at bay as long as he can, but it seems seems that it finally catches up with him when he commits suicide in 1961.

Hadley, on the other hand, starts off wishing for an all-encompassing union, but slowly comes to realize that “I couldn’t reach into every part of Ernest and he didn’t want me to” and that “he . . . liked that he could disappear into his work, away from me.” Hadley continues to practice her piano, but has no career of her own beyond that of wife and mother.

Therese Anne Fowler’s Z eventually dovetails with The Paris Wife in terms of characters and setting, but it begins as the story of rebellious, seventeen-year-old Montgomery, Alabama debutante Zelda Sayre. Zelda kisses boys, drinks gin, and chafes against her parents’ strict dress code while attending society functions at the local country club and entertaining an endless stream of gentleman callers, many of them local officers. It’s easy to see her influence on Daisy Buchanan. Like Hadley, Zelda can be reasonably sure of what her future holds—marriage to an affluent Southern planter and a lifetime of planning luncheons and parties—but Zelda is not as willing to throw caution to the wind. While Ernest and Hadley spent many years in poverty, Zelda breaks off her engagement with Scott when he seems on the verge of failure and only takes him back when This Side of Paradise is accepted for publication and they make their first home together in New York City’s Biltmore Hotel.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of Z is that Fowler’s story and the historical people on whome she bases it seem to be pulling in opposite directions. If the facts Fowler presents

9

were allowed to speak for themselves, they would paint Scott and Zelda as thoroughly detestable, but Fowler strives to mitigate this effect and make the Fitzgeralds into sympathetic characters. McClain manages to balance Ernest’s pride and adultery against his more redeeming qualities in a way that makes him likable, but in Fowler’s novel Scott never goes beyond being simply charming.

Scott is never particularly faithful to Zelda, talks her into an abortion, and even gives her a black eye. His immense aspirations seem to mask a crippling sense of insecurity. Although he and Zelda had earlier agreed to name their daughter Patricia, he stubbornly calls her Frances until Zelda gives in. Despite their substantial income, their lavish lifestyle continuously bankrupts them, forcing Scott to write frivolous short stories in order to pay their debts.

These stories damage his literary reputation, deepening his insecurities and driving him to drink, even as his drinking keeps him from getting any serious writing done. At one point, he responds to a minor slight by drunkenly hurling a heavy glass ashtray at the offender. Even winning Zelda seems to be an attempt to prove something to himself.

When she first travels from the Old South to the Roaring 20s metropolis of New York City, Zelda is awestruck.

Zelda’s admiring descriptions of Penn Station alone span several pages. This Side of Paradise is an instant hit, and Scott and Zelda find themselves celebrities. Tabloid writers follow them as they swill absinthe at speakeasies and drunkenly swim in public fountains.

Zelda’s struggle for her own identity is evident from the beginning of their marriage. During their first magazine interview, Scott coaches her to portray herself as a real-life version of Rosalind, a wealthy, young character from This Side of Paradise who refuses to marry the protagonist because he has no prospects. Later, while Scott neglects Zelda in order to dedicate himself to writing The Great Gatsby in an isolated Italian villa, she has an affair, seemingly out of desperation. It makes her feel like she is “no longer Mrs. F. Scott Fitzgerald” and is instead “a strange new Zelda Sayre released from all constrictions.” Once Scott finds out about the affair, he adapts and embellishes it for dramatic

10

effect, telling all their friends that her lover killed himself when she told him she wouldn’t leave her husband. When she begins to write stories, Scott helps get them published, but only if they are published under his name. Eventually, Zelda throws herself into ballet, overexerting herself until she is forced to enter a sanitarium where she continues to paint and write prolifically. Scott discourages and even sabotages her attempts to establish her own artistic career.

It seems that his ego will not let him admit his wife as a potential rival.

Although her characters are unlikable and her writing occasionally embraces the tropes of trashier romance novels, Fowler is conscious of Scott and Zelda’s status as a legendary literary couple and is able to lend the proper amount of weight to their romance, presenting their eventual separation as a tragedy rather than a simple dissolution.

“For us,” Zelda says “stars aligned, the gods smiled—prob’ly there was a tidal wave someplace.”

One of the most interesting aspects of reading two books with overlapping settings and characters was the opportunity to compare the narrators’ differing impressions of common characters and of each other. In Z, Zelda’s first impression of Hadley is of an unfashionably dressed woman who is “just about homely.” Hadley, in The Paris Wife, returns the favor with her description of Zelda: “She’s not beautiful.” Very catty.

Hadley’s appraisal of Scott and Zelda is of an eccentric couple who seem to have been burdened with perfectly interlocking cases of madness. Hadley is actually afraid to meet Zelda’s eyes and is put off by Scott’s habit of asking them oddly prying questions. At one point in The Paris Wife, the Fitzgeralds drunkenly begin jumping off a high cliff into rocky, rough waters. When Sara Murphy, their host, objects to their recklessness, Zelda innocently replies “Didn’t you know, we don’t believe in conservation?” We see Scott’s idealization of Zelda in his declaration that “[he’s] not really of the earth at all.” The episode of Scott throwing a glass ashtray is repeated in McClain’s novel, but it is more of a pathetic cry for attention than an overreaction to a perceived insult.

Fall 2014

The macho Ernest Hemingway portrayed in Fowler’s novel seems almost like a parody of the living, breathing character McClain crafted, saying things like “that makes you strong and heroic and true.” Zelda quips that “anybody who uses the word true as much as he does can only be the opposite.” She dislikes him from the beginning and, before we even meet Hemingway, she directly tells the reader that it was he who ruined her and Scott’s lives. There are even hints, written off in The Paris Wife as Zelda’s paranoia but taken more seriously in Z, of a homosexual relationship between Scott and Ernest. In her afterword, Fowler says that part of her goal in writing the book was to combat the libel that Hemingway perpetrated against Zelda in his memoir of his Paris years, A Moveable Feast. To explain Ernest’s dislike of Zelda, she invents a scenario in which Hemingway sexually propositions Zelda, who rejects and humiliates him. This episode seems unnecessary, since in both books Ernest makes it clear that he resents the way Zelda distracts Scott from his work, although Fowler challenges this widely-held opinion, implying that Scott would drink himself into poverty with or without Zelda in tow.

Both narrators have connections, through family or friends, to the burgeoning feminist movement, but keep themselves at a distance from it. Zelda and Hadley both drink, party, and allow themselves to enjoy sex, but only Zelda seriously pursues any career of her own. The tragedies of their respective marriages are caused by their tugging against the present in different directions. Hadley is caught in a world that is too modern for her, while Zelda’s world is not quite modern enough.

J.D. Salinger once complained that students of literature often seem more interested in the colorful lives of famous writers than in anything they actually wrote. While these novels certainly cater to that fascination, their real impact lies in their narrators. McClain and Fowler infuse Hadley and Zelda with strong and distinctive voices which enable them to tell the stories of fascinating people in an equally fascinating era, making these novels a joy to anyone who has ever looked at an old black-and-white portrait and wondered “What was she like?”Q Grayson Quay is a junior English major. His journal is 691 pages long and if you’ve ever said anything interesting to him, you’re probably in it somewhere.

11

Excerpt from Mickey and Bobbi

Chapter Two: The Orions Off Broad Street Alice Hodgkins After Evelyn left, the house wore an air of surprise through January, well into February. When they first missed her, Mickey and his father had gone out into the dark with flashlights, and called her name as if she were a lost kitten.

They had said to each other that she might be cold. As far as they knew she only ever went to the grocery store and the mall, but perhaps her new friend Happy had talked her into late night walks, and she had lost herself, had forgotten what night it was, that she needed to do a load of whites.

The day after that when she was still not back, David had considered filing a missing person’s report, but then he thought perhaps she had told him where she was going and he had simply not been listening. Or, then again, perhaps she had left him. He still hadn’t made it big yet, not yet. He had stood in front of the mirror that night while getting undressed and searched his anatomy for physical signs of grief and jiltedness. He found that his hairline was receding more frighteningly than he had remembered, that his knees ached with a swollen stiffness, and that his toes looked crooked and old. His wife had definitely split. He was alone. This was the puffing, bent body of a man with sundry traumas. Evelyn would now be one of them. He’d be alone on the ranch.

So he told his children that their mother must have needed some “heigh-ho and the open road,” and returned to work. Mickey told Bobbi that Mom had been talking about visiting Aunt Vi for a while now. Bobbi told the Pickaninnys that her mother had gone to see her other family in the south of France. But the house gave them away. Its eves rose a little in indignation. Its back steps, which before had always lain silent, groaned when you stepped on them. The side screen door snapped at passers-through.

No place had ever missed Evelyn like this before. She was born in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania to a doubtful mother and a large, hollow-chested father. She left for New York City at the age of twenty-four when several kind older women of her acquaintance suggested she could be a model, though she couldn’t. She was very beautiful and delicate, but was really too old to be entering the industry at that point and besides, her eyes were too blank and her shoulders too limp for a good shot. So she wandered around for a few years in the city, working odd jobs and home-making in studio apartments in Brooklyn, until one day, while taking the L train home, she met an impassioned serial graduate student named David Orion. He was delighted by her and she was delighted by his delight, so he convinced her to leave her actor boyfriend and come home with him. Now, more than twenty years later, she had left for the first time.

Mickey thought about calling Aunt Vi to ask if his mother really were there, but he never could decide whether he ought to ask her to come home, or just tell her to have a nice time, to get some rest, so he ended up not calling at all.

Evelyn was the sort of woman whose mere presence emitted a low, nervous humming sound, like an evening light bulb on the porch, which at first is enchanting, but later merely gives one a headache. Her drifting away from them for a while was almost a guilty relief, but she had had places and filled spaces and now, without her hum, they were silent. The shower went unscrubbed, the spice rack got hopelessly jumbled though they never used anything but the cinnamon, lint built up hazardously on its screen in the dryer, and usually no one at all remembered to lock the back door at night.

But no matter. Mickey discovered Jack Kerouac, Bobbi married beautiful Jane Pickaninny off to a troubled surgeon named Adam Glory, and David gritted his teeth and continued to sell insurance policies and shake clients’ sweaty hands with his most forceful grin.

At ten a.m. one Saturday in February, when Evelyn had been gone for more than forty days, Mickey woke up to an insistent knocking noise. He lay in bed and stared at the crack in his ceiling, wondering if he had a headache. He

12

Fall 2014

didn’t.

The knocking stopped. He got out of bed and stepped out of his own room onto the landing. Bobbi stood there in too-short pajamas, looking at him.

“Dad’s gone,” she said, “Who’s that?”

It began again, this time louder. “Oh.” Mickey said, feeling stiff. “That’s the door.” He went to answer it.

It was James Juncker, eyeing the welcome mat. He was a big, wide-faced man who had helped Mickey open his checking account at the bank the year before. Beside him stood a man whose name Mickey thought was Seph, who had long grey hair and used to show up at the elementary school in a wide variety of different uniforms to do safety assemblies, and beside him, a tall sheriff’s deputy Mickey had never seen before at all. Mr. Juncker peered behind Mickey as he opened the door. The thick furnishings of 267’s living room seemed to panic him.

“Mickey.” He put out his hand.

Mickey shook it. “Hi, sir.”

Mr. Juncker paused, as if no more words were necessary.

The strange deputy, who was swarthy and looked tired, shifted his boots on the echoing wooden floorboards.

Finally he said, “You the son? I’m Lieutenant Herman. We’ll need to speak with your father if there’s a problem.”

“He’s not here—at least I don’t think—he went in—somewhere—Bobbi?” He called her name up the stairs and his voice sounded hollow. She came pattering down from where she’d been leaning over the railing, and squeezed into the door frame next to Mickey, unashamedly clutching Ramona Pickaninny for support.

“He went to work at eight, I think. He finished the cereal,” she said.

Mr. Juncker tugged on his ear, reluctant to speak. “I’m sorry ‘bout all this, kids. We’ve had those papers for years, but no one even looked at them till October last year. This must be quite a upheaval for you folks, especially with your mom gone like she is.”

Mickey put his hand on Bobbi’s shoulder. He could feel his own heart beating. “We don’t know what papers you’re talking about, Mr. Juncker. Swear to God.” He added, as if he were in grade school.

Mr. Juncker hiccupped and scratched his neck. “The house? Your father’s been getting letters since December.”

Mickey stood up straight and forgot he was barefoot. “Come inside. It’s chilly.”

They blundered in awkwardly. For men who had knocked at a door, they did not seem to like passing through it much. Mickey offered them coffee, one of his culinary accomplishments. Lieutenant Herman put his hand on the mantle.

“Son, we’re not here for coffee. We’re here for the house. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but we’re here to repossess your property, or really, your parents’ property. Your father’s.” Bobbi sat down on one of the overstuffed red armchairs in the corner, tucked her feet under her and stared at him intensely. The lieutenant picked up a small elephant figurine which sat next to his hand and began to fiddle with it. “Like Jim said, he’s been getting letters. He did contact us once and promise he’d be out by the fifth, but that was almost a week ago now.”

Mickey wanted coffee. That or bed. Who gets up before noon on Saturday anyway? But Mr. Juncker had begun to strain words out of his wide face again. “Mickey, it’s nobody’s fault really, except your great-granddaddy’s, maybe. His will was such a mess. Looks like one of those novels my wife says she reads. We all thought for all these years that he left the house to your dad, but really it was the rightful property of the city all the time. It was supposed to be a historic site for posterity’s sake and everything. But nobody could tell, not even the lawyers—well, Joel Armand says he didn’t know, but—” “Coffee.” Mickey said. He looked at Bobbi. “Bobbi, let’s make coffee.” He herded her out of the chair and back

The Quad

13

toward the kitchen and plugged in the coffee pot.

The men wandered after him, and James Juncker continued to monologue, halting gratingly as he went. “Now all we need from you kids is to get ahold of your father and take with you today just—just whatever you’d like.” Mickey sharply dumped grounds into the filter. “The rest can come later. I don’t want you to worry. There are other houses. We’ll deal with everything with your dad. Don’t worry. Just pack yourself a suitcase and just head on out and wait for your dad and the rest of your things will come. Don’t worry yourself.” He choked himself silent in another panic when he saw the look on Bobbi’s face. Apparently, despite his admonitions, she was worrying.

Mickey swung three mugs out of the cabinet and handed them down to his sister without looking. She dropped them on the linoleum and two shattered while the third rolled and bumped. Bobbi began to cry.

Mickey clenched his sweaty feet on the floor, which needed a mop badly. “Excuse us,” he said. He picked up Bobbi bodily and swung her over his shoulder, like a rolled rug, stepping over the mess and carrying her all the way upstairs to the wide landing.

He set her down and knelt smartly in front of her, expecting to confront sobs. Instead her face was stiff with shock. And she was taller than he had thought. He was staring at her chest, which was not what he had planned. Weren’t ten-year-olds supposed to still be little tiny girls?

“They’re taking the house?” she asked him at last. “Really?”

“Well, yeah. Probably. I don’t know. But you know what else?”

“What?” She stared down at him in the full, late morning sun that came though the high, second-story windows.

“We’re gonna have to be brave.”

Bobbi pursed her lips. “Be brave.” She hiccupped.

“Yeah, be brave. Just keep repeating that. Just say it over and over. Just be brave, be brave, and be brave…”

“Be brave, be brave, and be brave,” she recited. “Be brave, be brave, and be brave.” And to Mickey’s surprise, she turned and marched sharply toward her room. “Be brave, be brave, and be brave.” He heard her drag out a suitcase.

He wandered into his own room and sat on the unmade bed. He thought it was still warm with his sleep, but maybe he imagined that. They were really leaving. The door was wide open, and he was being pushed through it. Out, up, and away. He pulled the big old duffel out from under his bed and began to layer the bottom with clothes. He could not bear to fill very much of it that way, though. That was enough. No more.

He went and stood in his little sister’s doorway. She was sitting in the middle of her cluttered floor, wrapping various Pickaninnys in her dresses, now crying freely.

“Bobbi?” he asked. “Will you help me pick books?”

She looked up at him through her little pane of tears. “What?”

“Come here.” She followed him to his room and he pointed towards his bookshelf. “Just pick.”

“Just pick?” She was awed, distracted for the moment.

He stood on the threshold and rocked nervously back and forth. “Fill the rest of the bag.”

She hesitated and then began to lift them off the shelf. He was glad she touched them gently, though he usually didn’t himself. First there came The Hobbit. Then an anthology of short stories. A manual on sailboats he had bought when he was fifteen. The Old Man and the Sea. Of Mice and Men. Band of Brothers. Beowulf. The seventh Harry Potter book.

And on it went. At last she slid in The Silver Sword and looked to Mickey for approval. He tried to nod encouragingly. “You got what you need packed?” She looked startled. “Hey, don’t worry. I’ll help you in a sec.”

Bobbi marched back to her own room. (Be brave, be brave and be brave.) Mickey removed Beowulf and the book

14

Fall 2014

on sailboats and fit in The Great Gatsby and his toothbrush and toothpaste. Then he zipped the bag shut. Before he checked with Bobbi, he knew what he had to do.

He hadn’t been in his parents’ bedroom more than three or four times in the past ten years. Mickey stood in front of the door with a priestly air for a few short seconds before opening it.

The room smelled of talcum and rubbing alcohol. He did not know why. It was dark—drapes pulled and carpet thick. He felt bound to rescue what he could of his parents, if not for them, for himself, or for posterity at the very least.

Something that he could pull out of his bag when he was camping in the hills of Spain, and later out of the back of a closet full of shirts he never had time to wear and say “This is my mother’s and this is my father’s. They forgot, but I remembered. I always remember.”

There were things in abundance. He saw lots of ugly little figurines and drooping pillows and several handmirrors and two shoeboxes full of old blank cassette tapes. The family Bible? Too big. An unused glass ashtray? It was covered in sticky dust. His mother’s TVGuide? Absolutely not. But Mickey had begun to look, and he was never much good at stopping once he had begun. There must be something. So he turned toward his mother’s little dressing room.

That Evelyn had even made an attempt to use this as a dressing room at all was strange. She was a woman who mixed twelve shades of beige with not much else. Sometimes she used to sit for hours in front of the round mirror in its black wicker frame, with perfect posture and her little hands folded in her lap. She would turn her small, angular face back and forth and let her long hair, which smelled of straw, fall over one shoulder and then the other. On days when she was particularly riled, she would twist it into a knot on top of her head, lift her chin as high as she could get it, and fix her reflection with a piercing look for nearly a quarter of an hour, trying to think good thoughts.

But Mickey knew none of that. He knew that the smell of this place made him want to throw up, but since he hadn’t had breakfast and there was nothing to throw up, that was impossible, which was satisfying. He turned on the light in the little boudoir. The hangars were empty and the smooth little dressing table was dusty.

Slouched in the corner was a life-sized rag doll made out of rough blue fabric the electric color of fertilizer, wearing overalls and a pinstriped hat. His name was Soup Alloy, and his stitched smile was full of benign comfort. Evelyn loved that doll, and Mickey knew it. She brought him out with great glittering ceremony on holidays, to sit in the red, upholstered chair in the corner of the dining room. He had a birthday, November fourth, for which his mother had liked to make cupcakes. They had been chocolate this year, and his dad had refused to eat one, even though it was Soup’s thirtieth.

For Evelyn to leave Bobbi and Mickey was one thing. Abandonment of Soup was entirely another. When he imagined her hailing her getaway taxi, he had always pictured her holding the grey duffel bag under one arm. (It was now missing from the attic, as it should be. She had taken it. That was a fact). Under the other arm she had cradled Soup.

Of course. But it wasn’t so. Here sat Soup in his yellow chair, covered in dust. Why? All at once, Mickey felt weirdly like crying. But you cannot cry in front of a rag doll any more than you can cry in front of the rest of the world.

Soup would not be coming in the knapsack to Spain. Mickey did not particularly want him in the back of that shirt closet either. He smelled smoky and distant, like woodchips from somebody else’s fire. But he lifted him into his arms anyway. He was heavy and thick, which is how Mickey felt as he stepped out of the unknown back into the hall.

He wanted to stuff the doll in a trash bag and put him by the curb, or at the very least, leave him as an oddity for the city to find, but the eerie patience in Soup’s button eyes let him do neither. He carried him downstairs, and Bobbi stared in awe.

The men also stared, particularly Seph, who was partial to staring. Mickey held his head up and tried to act as if

The Quad

15

Soup were a sickly old maiden aunt who needed him, but that was a stretch. He was a floppy, blue rag doll. He had a last name and it was Alloy. As Mickey turned toward the front door, he smelled something and remembered. “Is the coffee done? I love it when the coffee’s done!”

He set Soup down on the couch and slid calmly past the interlopers to the kitchen. Someone had cleaned up the broken mugs. He grabbed the last one and filled it to the brim with hot coffee. Then he strode back to the living room and called upstairs, “Bobbi! Your stuff ready?”

She hung woefully over the railing, still staring at Soup. “Yeah. I guess.” And she dragged herself away, arms then hips then feet, like a twisting puppet. (Be brave, be brave, and be brave.)

Mickey and Bobbi sat on the curb for an hour and a half as the sky turned to high noon. Mr. Juncker and Seph had repeatedly told them they could sit inside to wait for their dad, but Mickey stuck to the curb. Still in his pajama pants, with Soup settled between himself and his little sister, he watched city officials pass in and out and a lethargic moving crew appear. He needed a cigar, but didn’t have one here and probably shouldn’t abandon Bobbi for the Piggly Wiggly.

She sat pale and pink-nosed. The curb was cold. She was thinking her own dreadful thoughts, discovering layer upon layer of loss. “Mickey, will they send all my things later? Even the things on my walls?”

“I don’t know, Bobs.” he said absently. He was thinking of Gatsby’s house on West Egg. (Be brave, be brave and be brave.) Bobbi curled up her toes and her fists. She curled up her knees into her chest and let herself fall sideways into Soup like a shaken bowling pin, and the doll, in turn, flopped over onto Mickey’s lap.

Her brother looked down, discomfited.

“I miss Mom.” Bobbi said, craning up at him. Mickey thought that perhaps that was the first time any of them had said so.

He draped his arm around both Soup and his sister. “Dad’ll be here soon. He’ll explain.” Mickey wasn’t particularly sure whether his father would explain about the house or explain about his wife or just explain what to do with a crying ten-year-old. Maybe he could explain all life’s mysteries at once. Mickey felt about due for that.

When David did pull up he leapt out of the car next to the curb, his forehead shining with sweat. “Okay, kids.

It’s my lunch break and I have just enough time to get you over to a hotel. You bringing the doll, Mike?”

So they bundled in, a sniffling Bobbi with Soup in the backseat and Mickey in front listening expectantly to his father’s driving chatter. The radio was playing country music at an indecipherable hum, and he wanted desperately to turn it off, to have silence.

Alice Hodgkins (‘14) has now gone from writing about teenagers to teaching them. She adores doing both, even when they exhaust her.

16

Bondage Angell Fonner

Knots of rough linen bind my wrists, A futile attempt at self-restraint.

At sunrise I catch a glimpse of my hands, the blood of my victims condemning paint.

The evil in my mind gnaws hungrily on my thoughts.

I have been in this tomb ever since the day I watched in horror as my nails dug deep into the soft white of my wife’s neck.

Blood flowed incessantly.

Helpless, I turned to my mother next.

She was squatting on the floor weaving camel fibers into a rug.

I thrust the bone shuttle into her crooked back.

I fled from that dark dwelling, desperate to remove my sinister thoughts.

I jumped off a cliff.

Hurtling towards the rocky shore line I felt relief, but I wasn’t hurt by the slick stones and was soon madly climbing up the sheer rock.

I walked rabidly into the nearby village that night.

Ravenous, when sandals shuffled past I sprung from my shadowed corner.

My strength was stunning as I snapped the necks of bright women and splattered the blood of men on their unspotted robes.

The Quad

17

I relished the horror graven on the face of one walking by, but his bellowing beckoned others with lanterns brilliantly lit.

The evil occupying my body was repulsed.

I, strong, fought through the crowd and found refuge in this tomb.

I etch these words into the rock.

Suddenly I hear footsteps, slow ones, confident ones.

Deliberate ones.

I rush out to scare the intruder.

A sliver of life in me quickens.

I desperately try to control my thoughts, but the man’s calm demeanor provokes the legion’s frenzy.

I flail in terror and spew grotesque oaths.

The evil calls this man the Son of God and my murder-marred soul suddenly hopes.

Quickly, convulsions take over my body just as this brave man walks towards me.

He places an immaculate palm on my bulging eyes.

I drown.

When I wake, The blood has been gently scrubbed away.

Wickedness no longer burns through my veins.

My soul is filled with cool light.

Angell Fonner’s (’15) favorite baking ingredient is molasses. Sometimes she eats it by the spoonful.

18

Walker Percy’s American Apocalypse Dr. Collin Messer

Something is dreadfully wrong with the world of the emotionally mature, integrated man. What it is becomes clear in the writings of Heidegger and Marcel. The modern world, not merely the slums of Paris but the pleasant American suburb, is implicated in a special sort of tragedy. This tragedy is not the catastrophic wars of the 20th century—though God knows these are tragic enough. These particular events are only symptoms of the tragedy; indeed they might even be said to be desperate attempts to escape it. The tragedy has rather to do with the fundamental banality, the loss of meaning, of modern life—what Heidegger calls the “every-day-ness” and the homelessness of life in the modern world, a world which Marcel refers to as a broken world.

—Walker Percy, “Which Way Existentialism”

T

hus Walker Percy, in an unpublished essay written in

impoverishment. Among many commendable qualities,

the late 1950s, offers his assessment of contemporary the chief strength of A Political Companion to Walker Percy American life. It is life that is no life. To use one of Percy’s is that editors Peter Lawler and Brian Smith have collected favorite (if grim) expressions, it is death-in-life. Such a turn a fine group of essays that not only explores the political of phrase powerfully captures the malaise, the noxious implications of Percy’s work but also takes seriously its particles, the despair, etc. that beset his characters and (at philosophical and theological foundations. Like much of times) perhaps even Percy himself. Percy often wondered Percy’s writing, as we encounter them in 2014, these essays in his essays and novels how we are to undertake the task of seem remarkably propitious, even prescient, as they remind living in the world “without falling prey to the worldliness us time and again of our fundamental predicament. As of the world.” And, to be sure, for Percy this world was Percy writes in his essay, “The Delta Factor,” “A theory of not an abstraction. Like many of his literary neighbors in man must account for the alienation of man.” the South, he recognized the formidable In the rough and tumble decades of A Political Companion to claims that place and particularity make the 1950s and 1960s during which Percy Walker Percy. Eds. Peter upon the writer. It is therefore no surprise found his voice as a writer, politics were Augustine Lawler and Brian that Percy’s work reveals an abiding conunavoidable, at least for southerners. A A. Smith. Lexington: UP of cern with politics that is robust enough to lifelong Democrat (but seldom a political Kentucky, 2013.

285 pages. inspire a rich collection of scholarly essays partisan of any stripe), Percy was an astute $40.00 cloth on the same. However, for careful readers observer of and erstwhile participant in of Percy’s work, it is equally unsurprising some of the most significant political that his diagnosis of the human condition—while compel- movements of his lifetime. On the one hand, Percy never lingly dramatized for us in a world of southern manners lost a deep sense of respect and gratitude for the courageous and politics—reveals pathologies that reach far beyond mere example of his cousin and surrogate father William Alexpolitics or even political philosophy. Percy well understood ander Percy, the great southern poet and stoic who joined that the writer, in Flannery O’Connor’s words, “operates his father (U.S. Senator LeRoy Percy) in facing down the at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity Klan in Mississippi in the 1920s. After his conversion to somehow meet” (“The Regional Writer”).

Catholicism in 1947, however, Walker Percy’s embrace of Hence the political maladies we readily observe in the Church’s teachings on social justice eventually moved Percy’s writing are not first causes. Rather, they are symp- him to an integrationist stance. As Percy makes clear in his toms of what Percy always regarded as a deeper ontological finest essay on southern politics, “Stoicism in the South”

The Quad

(1956), to take such a stand was to make a significant break with his family’s patrician past. Percy’s progressive racial politics became even more public and pronounced in 1970 when he made the bold decision to testify as an expert witness in the U.S. District Court in New Orleans regarding the meaning of the Confederate flag in southern life. Percy spoke in support of a group of African American high school students who had objected to the principal of their local public school hanging the Stars and Bars in his office. Percy concluded that the flag’s meaning (at least since the Brown decision) had become largely representative of “segregation, white supremacy, and racism.”

In national politics, Percy’s fervent Catholicism undoubtedly fired his enthusiastic embrace of John F. Kennedy. A few years later, he grieved Kennedy’s assassination so deeply that his second novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), was delayed by more than a year. Given Percy’s inveterate shyness when it came to the literary limelight or any notoriety generally, it is most surprising that he appeared on William F. Buckley’s nationally broadcast Firing Line in 1972, along with the great southern writer Eudora Welty. With winsome perspicacity, Percy turned a rather predictable discussion of “the Southern imagination” into a veritable seminar on the predicament of modern man.

I find it helpful to read A Political Companion to Walker Percy against this back drop, especially because Percy’s literary and philosophical project seldom fails to comment on the American enterprise, including politics. He once described his existentialist fictional mode as being characterized by “the apocalypse of the country club”: “I wouldn’t dare write of the twentieth century as such,” wrote Percy in 1986. He continued: Most writers, I believe, sense that these evils are too vast and too close to be portrayed in any aesthetic mode; in fact, my own hunch is that only a major theological vision like Dostoevsky’s can accommodate such evils, that a truly demonic age is too much for writers of sociological realism. . . . But show me a couple, a man and wife, who have moved into the condo of their dreams on the Gulf Coast or fronting the Heritage golf course at Hilton Head to live the good life, except that the man is spending seven instead of six hours in front of his

19

cable TV and has graduated from a six-pack to an eight-pack, and the woman is spending more and more time at Gloria Marshall’s and reading Nancy Friday and Judith Krantz—and neither man nor wife has said a word to the other for days, let alone touched each other— and I’m on home grounds. (“Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time”)

Whatever political questions Percy pursues are never divorced from a sharply drawn contemporary American setting. The ephemeral satisfaction derived from the American dream is ever impressed upon us. His America is often suburban, and, as we read above, his characters typically haunt the increasingly prosperous Sunbelt. Whether we view it from the freshly minted sidewalks of Binx Bolling’s Gentilly (a new suburban neighborhood outside of New Orleans) or the golf links on Will Barrett’s mountain in western North Carolina, the pursuit of happiness often comes in for rough treatment. Whenever Percy brings his Roman Catholic faith to bear on the American scene, we find much wanting even in the best of environments. Percy (in his own words) relentlessly “calls into question modern man’s fondest assumption, that he has made the world over for his happiness and that therefore he must be happy” (“Which Way Existentialism”).

Because Lawler and Smith so clearly understand the contours of Percy’s polemic, they present us with a strong and varied group of essays that presents several fruitful approaches to his essays and novels. A number of writers take up Percy’s theory of man and its political implications.

Among the best in this group is James V. Schall’s “On Dealing with Man.” Focusing largely on Percy’s philosophical essays and Lost in the Cosmos, Schall explicates Percy’s complaint against modern political philosophy, especially his concern that Enlightenment political projects generally go astray as they seek (in Eric Voegelin’s words) to “immanentize the eschaton.” Such hubris cuts across the grain of Percy’s most basic insight into the human situation. Upon receiving the National Book Award for The Moviegoer in 1962, he proclaimed that “Man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more even than a mature and creative individual, as the

20

phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim.” Thus, Percy believes that to embrace modern liberalism and its politics is to imbibe the Gnosticism of our age. As Schall contends, Percy frankly satirizes any promises of a blithe autonomy that frees us from the nitty-gritty particularities of intersubjective life among people who share our pilgrim status.

A second grouping of critics forthrightly addresses Percy’s musings on the American dream. Elizabeth Amato’s essay on the pursuit of happiness explores Percy’s critique of the self-forgetfulness that the American dream often inspires. Amato undertakes keen readings of The Moviegoer, Lost in the Cosmos, and The Thanatos Syndrome in her explication of one of Percy’s most provocative insights. Remarkably, Percy sees our unhappiness not as something to be gotten rid of, but rather as a fact of human existence that might prompt us to consider, as Amato puts it, “what our lingering discontent may indicate about ourselves” (48).

“The liberal pursuit of happiness,” she continues “does not properly understand the human being as a needy, dependent being who, above all, needs other people to live well” (65). Amato shows how Percy, albeit often through negative examples, insists upon a true community that might nurture authentic human flourishing while still embracing our pilgrim predicament.

Usefully building upon Amato’s clear-sighted discussion is Richard Reinsch’s consideration of marriage in Love in the Ruins and The Second Coming. Marriage is foundational to Percy’s social ethics. Indeed, as Reinsch rightly recognizes, many of Percy’s novels achieve hopeful resolution only as they recover the healthful practice of married life. This sacred relation provides perhaps the best antidote to the dissatisfaction and death-dealing that are endemic to the “theorist-consumer” role that this age foists upon us. Beyond his thematic analysis of the novels, Reinsch also argues for Percy’s political relevance even in our own vexing times, especially in light of our current national conversation on marriage. Given the South’s enduring social conservatism in favor of traditional marriage and family, Reinsch suggests that the region’s religious folk (both Protestant and Catholic) might yet have a role to play in helping

Fall 2014

the rest of the country to recover the “twofold love between man and God and husband and wife” that Percy celebrates (176).

I applaud Reinsch’s optimism, but only as it is tempered with Flannery O’Connor’s insight that the while “the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted” (“Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”). O’Connor well instructs us. Nearly every happy marriage in Percy’s novels (Binx and Kate, Tom and Ellen, Will and Allie) appears exceptional, even in the South. And among these unions, only the marriage of Will and Allie inspires hope that they will prove truly capable of restoring each other and their neighbors to a polis that reflects biblical values. Whatever aspirations we have for realizing the biblical beloved community and offering a winsome southern witness to its viability, we may not be able to hope for more than what Percy dares to dramatize in the lives of his most redemptive characters.

Finally, for those of us who come to Percy chiefly because of our love of literature (more so than politics), a couple of essays address Percy’s novels via a more forthright focus on literary history and analysis. Chief among these is Farrell O’Gorman’s very fine chapter on Lancelot. In “Confessing the Horrors of Radical Individualism in Lancelot: Percy, Dostoevsky, and Poe,” O’Gorman situates Percy within two disparate veins of the western philosophical tradition (scientific humanism and romantic idealism) with particular attention to literary genre. Percy once remarked in an essay on Herman Melville that “there’s no occupation in the universe that is lonelier and that at the same time depends more radically on a . . . commonwealth of other writers.” For O’Gorman, this statement provides the impetus for discovering in Lancelot what he describes as a “problematically” confessional mode that partakes of both Dostoevsky’s romantic alienation and Poe’s Gothic despair.

In Dostoevsky and Poe alike, such a manner of confession is unwittingly aided and abetted, suggests O’Gorman, by the Protestant Reformation’s promise of autonomy and liberation from a medieval (Catholic) past. O’Gorman is most persuasive in demonstrating Percy’s debt to Poe. That

The Quad

Percy alludes throughout Lancelot to several Poe stories is obvious, but O’Gorman deftly uses these congruities to elucidate the prodigious negativity that distinguishes Lance among all of Percy’s characters. More importantly, O’Gorman also explains how Percy reconfigures the idea of confession. Lance Lamar’s only hope in recovering from the solipsism of his murderous and tormented self, says O’Gorman, is to eschew and reach beyond the radical autonomy so celebrated by Enlightenment liberalism and romantic self-reliance alike. As he seeks to connect with his fellow inmate, Percival, Lance must risk a sacramental confession that might just unite him with the communion of saints.

This collection of essays reminds me of a number of conferences dedicated to Percy’s work that I’ve attended in recent years at Loyola University in New Orleans (http:// www.loyno.edu/wpc/). To give or listen to a paper at such a

21

gathering is not to participate in the hermeneutics of suspicion. All too often, academicians gather in an atmosphere fraught with skeptical cynicism and pride, determined to persuade their auditors or readers that their ideas are more compelling than those of the author they’ve (ostensibly) gathered to discuss. Readers of Percy seldom get together for such purposes. In their own delightful way, Percy’s novels and essays offer too much joy and pleasure—even hope—to sustain much academic scorn. On the contrary, Percy is the kind of writer who inspires in his readers the emergence of their best selves: philosophically sound, winsomely persuasive, graciously good-humored. This is not to say that the refreshing and original essays that Smith and Lawler have put together here constitute some sort of uncritical festschrift. However, without apology they give us good cause to be once again impressed by and thankful for Percy’s wisdom and thoughtfulness.Q H. Collin Messer teaches American literature and humanities at GCC.

22

The Leap Tucker Sigourney Its promises are shrouded by the mist Which lies below: is darkness there, or light?

What man can thwart so dizzying a height?

And still it calls, to those by passion kissed.

No. That’s a reckless deal, for fools or Faith; A Realist would not be duped, and fall For Certainty is comfort. After all, The ledge is stone, and solid worlds are safe.

The ledge is where he stands, is stretched between The Ground that holds up every easy thing, Or danger’s Wind, and songs of old that sing A Beauty not in dreams or poets seen.

His soul quakes with the mountain’s nervous breath, And hears the vast unknown before him call Within, the longing pleads with him to fall; The echoes answer: fearlessness is death.

Men cling to earth as Summer clings to snow, But hesitation reaps a vapid life For Dust is fleeting; one or both must go And there are things it’s worth one death to know.

Release, O Mortal, all your mounted strife: A shout to split the stones: Geronimo!

Tucker Sigourney (‘16) got to ride a rhinoceros once. Not really, of course, but that would be pretty awesome.

23

Thinking for the Glory of God Dalton Bowser

T

he use of the mind is a much debated topic among thinking and humble dependence on God can coincide.

Christians today. Many Christians reject intellectual Thinking, as Piper defines it, is mainly “working hard efforts after seeing abuses of the mind. For example, they with our minds to figure out meaning from texts” (45). see men go to seminary and come back revolutionized One must work hard with his mind to figure out what an (for the worse) in their theological views. Consequently, author is saying, and then respectfully evaluate the arguanti-intellectuals see thinking as pitted against their faith. ment. Piper’s application of this idea mainly focuses on On the other hand, others see the use of the mind as an the reading of Scripture. In fact, most of Think is about imperative of the Christian faith grounded in God’s com- the importance of thinking seriously about God’s Word in mands. They acknowledge the tension between thinking order to understand Him better. Piper certainly supports and compromise but say that Christians must not shy away Christian scholarship, but in Think he focuses on the from thinking, despite its dangers. In response to such foundations of thinking rather than specific applications tensions many writers have sought to articulate a proper to academic disciplines. As he puts it, Think is mainly “for Christian approach to the life of the mind. the Christian – in or out of school – who Piper, John. Think: The Entering into this debate is John wants to know God better, love him more, Life of the Mind and the Piper’s Think: The Life of the Mind and the and care about people” (16).

Love of God. Wheaton, Love of God. Piper, a well-known evangelical One of Think’s main contributions to IL: Crossway, 2010. pastor and proponent of Reformed theolthe thinking debate is its exposition of the $15.99 ogy, contributes to the debate over the life two most-cited seemingly anti-intellectual of the mind by lovingly and thoughtfully rejecting both anti-intellectualism and over-intellectualism.

His “plea” is “to reject either-or thinking when it comes to head and heart, thinking and feeling, reason and faith, theology and doxology, mental labor and the ministry of love” (15). He does not believe that thinking and feeling are pitted against each other and seeks to show how they are to work together.

As Piper lays out in his introduction, what makes Think different than the other books on the life of the mind is its largely expositional approach. Piper deals with two passages of Scripture that seem to support anti-intellectualism: Luke 10:21 and 1 Corinthians 1:20, revealing the error of anti-intellectual interpretations through careful exegesis.

On the opposite side of the issue, Piper also deals with the problem of pride in the academy and calls for “humble,

passages. The first is Luke 10:21: “You have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children.” The second is 1 Corinthians 1:20: “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” With a chapter devoted to each passage, Piper offers careful, solid exegesis and concludes “that the terms ‘wise and understanding’ and ‘little children’ in Luke 10:21 do not correspond simply to ‘educated’ and ‘uneducated.’

Jesus is not saying that the uneducated get the grace of revelation and the educated don’t” (154). On the surface this passage might seem to be speaking only about the educational stature of people, but Piper suggests that on closer inspection, it is talking more about attitude than education.

The person with the humble attitude, coming to God and realizing that he has nothing to offer, and fully

faithful, prayerful, Spirit-dependent, rigorous thinking” (123). Piper avoids both extremes by showing that rigorous

relying upon Him for salvation is the one to whom God gives eternal life. On the contrary, those who are proud

1

Examples include Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Os Guinness’s Fit Bodies Fat Minds, and James Sire’s Habits of the Mind.

24

and self-sufficient, trusting in their own goodness, God rejects. Either of these attitudes can come from educated or uneducated people. The issue is the attitude, not the level of education. This solid exposition debunks the argument of those who quote these passages as anti-intellectual proof texts. According to Piper’s exposition, people cannot use this passage to indict thinking. However, it is a healthy reminder to all to watch their attitudes before God and see if they are serving Him with humility. This leads to the next big issue Piper confronts in thinking: pride.

Piper calls thinking “dangerous and indispensable” (164). It is dangerous because it can easily puff up, but that does not mean that we run from it. Piper says that “every level of mental life – from the most educated to the most uneducated – is fraught with the alluring power of living for the praise of man. The unique vulnerability of the intellectual elite is that the world buttresses this pride with extraordinary approval and esteem, while passing over the more low-brow forms of pride with less veneration” (170).

It is very tempting for a Christian scholar to work for the acceptance and affirmation of secular colleagues, but this is not using the mind for the glory of God. What is needed are “little children” who are “little concerned with the praises of men and the human accolades for their intellectual work. . . . [but] have been so humbled by the glory of God’s grace and so satisfied by the beauty of God’s greatness that all their energy aims at discovering more of God in his world and displaying what they have seen for others to see and enjoy” (171). Piper gives a healthy reminder to any who do intellectual work to avoid thinking too highly of themselves. It is so easy in that line of work to do so, and “[w]ithout a profound work of grace in the heart, knowledge – the fruit of thinking – puffs up. But with that grace, thinking opens the door of humble knowledge. And that 2

Fall 2014

knowledge is the fuel of the fire of love for God and man” (165). It is fitting and beneficial that Piper has addressed this common problem among thoughtful individuals.

Piper also defines what he thinks it means to love God with all our minds. He says that “[s]ome have treated this as if it means ‘think hard and think accurately, and that act of thinking is loving God’”(19). Piper, however, believes “that loving God with the mind means that our thinking is wholly engaged to do all it can to awaken and express the heartfelt fullness of treasuring God above all things” (19). He defines loving God as treasuring Him. Therefore one’s whole self, including the mind, needs to be engaged in doing that, although “love for God is most essentially an experience of the affections, not mere thoughts or behaviors” (87). Thinking is a capacity which adds knowledge to fuel the fire of our affections towards God. Overall, Think is “not about going to school or getting degrees or having prestige. It’s not about the superiority of intellectuals. It’s about using the means God has given us to know him, love him, and serve people. Thinking is one of those means” (17). Piper wants “to encourage you to think, but not to be too impressed with yourself when you do” (17). Think offers sound exposition debunking the so-called anti-thinking passages in Scripture alongside a warning about the peril of pride; and Piper writes in a way that inflames a passion for humble thinking for the glory of God. Think is a solid work that will hopefully, by the grace of God, further separate fact from fiction in the debate over Christian thinking and will lead many to think seriously, yet humbly, about God, His Word, and His world to the praise of His glory.Q Dalton Bowser (’16) was an English Major, thought about becoming a History Major, decided to stay an English Major, became a History Major, and is now once again an English Major… for the moment.

He addresses the subject in chapter 13.

In this section Piper has a footnote with a quote from Douglas Wilson that I found insightful and entertaining: “The ache that some conservatives have to be taken seriously in the unbelieving academy is a pitiful thing indeed, and so I would like to take this opportunity to give the whole thing the universal raspberry. What Princeton, Harvard, Duke, and all the theological schools in Germany really need to hear is the horse-laugh of all Christendom. I mentioned earlier that proud flesh bonds to many strange things indeed, and I forgot to mention scholarship and footnotes. To steal a thought from Kierkegaard, ‘Many scholars line their britches with journal articles festooned with footnotes in order to keep the Scriptures from spanking their academically-respectable pink, little bottoms.’” (171).

3

25

26

Conundrums The Cargo Master (Viking Conundricles, Part 1)

Sometime last month, you grew bored of your commonplace existence in a small northern Viking village and longed to sprinkle your life with a hint of adventure. So you did not surprise yourself much when, in a sudden moment of midlife-crisis-induced spontaneity, you volunteered to accompany the raiding party of the famous warrior Olaf Smitsglomen as the replacement for their recently and tragically deceased cargo-master. Before the journey, you were tasked with packing the ships as efficiently as possible.

With the complex arts of Viking mathematics and naval science, you determined that the speed of each ship is directly proportional to the percentage of its total cargo capacity that is left unoccupied (for example, a ship that is carrying a weight equal to 30% of its capacity has 70% of that capacity free, and so will move at 70% its maximum speed).

You know that the party will be taking these four ships (each listed with its cargo hold's weight limit), and that all of them move at the same maximum speed of 16 spear-throws per hour*: The Eager Yak: 60 stone The Bard's Blockage: 100 stone The Lady Olga Rotundusdotter: 150 stone The Meandering Peasant: 90 stone You have been tasked with arranging the following cargo on these ships: One caged baby dragon (for starting fires): 70 stone Two small catapults (in case of castles): 40 stone each One large cow (to feed to the dragon): 30 stone One large opera singer (in case of boredom): 30 stone A set of spare oars (in case of sea monsters): 10 stone Two crates of nectarines (in case of cravings): 10 stone each Your goal, of course, is to present to Mr. Smitsglomen the arrangement of cargo that will allow for the fastest possible travel (and the party can only arrive as quickly as the slowest ship, so plan accordingly). *If you know (as all good Vikings do) that one spear-throw per hour translates to approximately one knot, you may notice that Vikings are rather arrogant when it comes to their spear-throwing abilities.

27

The Quad purchases all its books through Hearts & Minds, an independent bookstore in Dallastown, PA — You should too.

Visit www.heartsandmindsbooks.com for book recommendations on any topic and information on placing orders.

28

The Quad | Fall 2014 Volume 7 ♌ Issue 1 The Quad c/o John Gordon GCC #807 200 Campus Drive Grove City, PA 16127