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Bestselling author Paul Elie visits Villanova
By Michael Nataro '06
On Jan, 26, Paul Elie, bestselling author of “The
Life You Save May Be Your Own” gave a lecture titled “Walker Percy’s
Dialogue’s” in Connelly Center. Hosted by the Office for Mission
Effectiveness, this lecture was the fourth in a year-long serious titled
“Catholic Imagination in Literature.”
In his lecture, Elie discussed the nature of
pilgrimage in the context Walker Percy, one of the four great American
Catholics in his acclaimed book. Elie talked about Walker Percy as a writer,
philosopher, semiotics student, and Catholic. According to Elie, his
spiritual journey, which eventually resulted in his conversion to
Catholicism, was the result of a life filled with sharing and love, tragedy
and solitude. He revealed how Percy came from a wealthy Protestant family
stricken by misfortune at a young age with the suicide of his father and the
death of his mother. He went to live with his uncle in his teenage years who
was a benevolent “baron” of a small, southern town. His uncle’s house always
saw many visitors and guests, who would stay for months at a time writing
and philosophizing. He learned an immense amount of knowledge about the
world and about life from his uncle and his friends. Stricken with
tuberculosis in his twenties, he left the south to go to upstate New York to
recover. The isolation and solitude in upstate New York allowed him to write
and philosophize himself. The reading and writing he was able to do, as well
as the friendship and support he received from his best friend Shelby Foote,
guided him on his own, personal pilgrimage to the folds of the Catholic
Church. For Percy, the church provided him the opportunity to assert his own
identity from his family, but provide a means of understanding their
importance. In the church, Percy found the “human standard,” that man was
part angel, part beast. As a result of the tragedy that his life was full
of, he constantly attempted to diagnose human unhappiness. For Percy, he
forsook the need to diagnose human unhappiness but rather used the church,
as well as the Catholic human anthropological understanding, as a vehicle by
which to remedy it.
Following the lecture, Elie allowed a few minutes to
sign the books for his readers. |
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