Attention!
Words are attention.
Labels: thought
But what is important to notice is that the hero or anti-hero of the contemporary novel hardly qualifies under any of these conventional mental-health canons—emotional maturity, autonomy, and so forth. Indeed, he, and more recently she, is more often than not a solitary, disenchanted person who is radically estranged from his or her society, who has generally rejected the goals of his family and his peers, and whose encounters with other people, friendships and love affairs, are regularly attended by misunderstandings, misperceptions, breakdowns in communication, aggressions, and withdrawals, all occurring in a general climate of deflated meaning. People in novels meet, talk, make love, and go their separate ways without noticeable joy or sorrow. Indeed, the main emotion one encounters in contemporary fiction is a sense of unreality, a grayness and flatness, a diminished sense of significance.
—Walker Percy
—Walker Percy
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
