![]() ![]() Such a turn of phrase powerfully captures the malaise, the noxious particles, the despair that beset his fictional characters, and at times perhaps even Percy himself. To use one of Percy’s favorite (if grim) expressions, it is death-in-life. 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. These particular events are only symptoms of the tragedy indeed they might even be said to be desperate attempts to escape it. This tragedy is not the catastrophic wars of the 20th century-though God knows these are tragic enough. The modern world, not merely the slums of Paris but the pleasant American suburb, is implicated in a special sort of tragedy. What it is becomes clear in the writings of Heidegger and Marcel. ![]() Something is dreadfully wrong with the world of the emotionally mature, integrated man. In an unpublished essay from the late 1950s called “Which Way Existentialism,” Walker Percy offered his assessment of contemporary American life: ![]()
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