by Mark Caleb Smith, Dean of Cedarville’s School of Arts & Humanities
What is the purpose of the Arts and Humanities? Walker Percy (1916-1990), the novelist, gives us a sense of the possibilities. With his feet in the past, but his head turned to the future, Percy relied on a broad and deep education to diagnose the human condition. His faith allowed him to cope with what he found, even as he walked in ruins.
Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the chronological and geographical heart of the Deep South. Orphaned by his father’s suicide, and his mother’s accidental death, Percy settled with family in Greenville, Mississippi. By way of the University of North Carolina, he ventured to medical school at Columbia University.
Though he completed his M.D., Percy developed tuberculosis. The only remedy was rest. With little else to do, he read philosophy, theology, and fiction. Percy began to question whether his medical training gave him sufficient understanding of what truly ailed his own species. After fits and starts, he took up writing.
His first published novel was The Moviegoer (1961). His “protagonist,” Binx Bolling, a privileged young man of economic and social means, is in search of purpose. He knows, even though he is flat and unreflective, his life is empty. Binx’s discomfort with everyday things is softened when he goes to the movies. The vivid colors, thundering sound, and perfect actors placate him momentarily, but they cannot sustain him.
Through the eyes and angst of Binx Bolling, Walker Percy saw, more than sixty years ago, the problems of a society saturated with technology, unmoored from faith, and disinterested in reason. Bolling’s Aunt Emily tries to steer Binx toward better things when she tells him, “A man must live by his lights and do what little he can and do it as best he can.”
The study of the humanities shows us not only what ails the world, but also, through cracks and shadows, the glories of a different way. Binx Bolling searched for meaning and could not find it. Our search, at a place like Cedarville, is for how to carry the meaning we have into the ruins that surround us.
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