'The Thanatos Syndrome' In Our Time
And: What Russia Wants; What Does Travel Mean? Tate, Fuentes, & Marriage
I hope this First Things essay by Algis Valiunas, “Walker Percy’s Pilgrimage,” is outside the paywall. I subscribe (and you should too!), so I’ve been able to read it. If it isn’t, and you don’t want to subscribe, just you wait till they free it for the general reader. It’s a good overview of the novelist’s life and the meaning of his work. I was struck quite personally by this passage:
The last and most ambitious novel Percy wrote, The Thanatos Syndrome (1987), is also the most disturbing, shot through with his vehement hatred of the latest moral improvements in the name of tender-heartedness and the advancement of learning for the relief of man’s estate—to invoke a founder of the modern scientific project to remake inhuman nature and human nature, the better to serve our comfort and convenience and pleasure. Warmth and uplift are the furthest things from Percy’s mind here. He is conducting a crusade of vengeance against enormities that ought to be unthinkable but instead are readily conceived and casually executed.
We have met Dr. Thomas More before, in Love in the Ruins (1971): Psychiatrist and inventor of the Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer, he was pursuing three lusty young women at once while trying to avoid the worst of the Bantu uprising, in which determined American blacks established their empire over an enervated white populace. In the later novel, the Bantu heyday is over and it is a new era in America, as the Supreme Court has declared “pedeuthanasia” legal for infants who face “a life without quality,” and assisted suicide for the old is proceeding apace. Dr. More, for his part, is bemused by the increasing incidence of patients who had been overcome by anxiety, insomnia, drug addiction, or sepulchral depression and now are preternaturally alert, chipper, brilliant, and rapturous with the joy of being alive. But there are also cases of quite normal people who suddenly commit acts of mindless violence—typical sufferers of “pure angelism-bestialism,” who “either considered themselves above conscience and the law or didn’t care.” With Sherlockian investigative address, Dr. More and his posse trace these bizarre psychic eruptions to the presence in the water supply of Na-24, heavy sodium isotopes, which in therapeutic dosages produce extraordinary mental acuity and emotional exuberance, but at toxic levels cause regression to instinctual animal behavior. Benevolent scientists, physicians, and government types have been conducting a local trial run of Na-24, with the prospect of going national or even global in due course. Dr. More throws a wrench in the works and saves the day. While he’s at it, our hero breaks up a ring of pedophiles at a leading private academy, who have used the isotopes to drug the children into blissed-out submissiveness, and whose diabolically cunning leader declares blandly that he is undoing two thousand years of hatred for and shame at the human body, replacing them with perfectly natural loving-kindness.
Percy gives his signature line to Father Smith, who has taken to a fire-watch tower after the manner of St. Simeon Stylites, and who reflects continually on the abominations of the twentieth century, conducted in the name of compassion and human perfectibility: “Tenderness leads to the gas chamber. . . . More people have been killed in this century by tender-hearted souls than by cruel barbarians in all other centuries put together.” Percy’s satire burns in this novel, razing to the ground the best intentions of modern scientific humanism, the prevailing wisdom of our time and place, which he has rejected because he recognizes that it is inhuman, and because he knows of something better.
Percy set that novel in my home, West Feliciana Parish, which had recently constructed a nuclear reactor. The reactor plays into the plot.
Funny story, and true: in the mid-1970s, when they began building the thing, our parish was flooded by workers from Up North who came to construct it. Their children all of a sudden turned up in our local schools. It was the first time any of us had had to deal with Yankee accents not on television. That was one thing, but the Yankee manners of the children? Why, these little barbarians did not say “Yes ma’am” and “No sir” to adults, but merely “yes” and “no.” Worse — écrasez l’infâme! — they called adults by their first names! We Southern kids hadn’t imagined such a thing was possible. I exaggerate not one bit when I tell you it was as if the cosmos cracked. Had those children shown up in our midst with bones through their noses, we could hardly have been more shocked.
It is hard to express to people not from the South how deep this sense of propriety and hierarchy resides in the Southern soul. My Dallas-born wife and I felt a sense of relief when we decided in late 2011 to move with our kids to West Feliciana, in the wake of my sister’s death. The relief came because it dispelled the tension over raising our kids in Yankeeland, where they would learn to call adults by their first names. We were already struggling with this for the year and a half we lived in Philadelphia. We wanted our children to be well brought up, but it wasn’t really fair to them to make them freaks among the other kids with their Southern manners. Thankfully we solved the problem. Of course it disastrously led to the end of our marriage, the move, but by God, our chillun grew up with proper manners!
Anyway, Percy. Reading that passage this morning reminded me of the excellent Apple TV sci-fi series Pluribus, the sixth episode of which drops today. It’s the tale of an alien virus that swiftly takes over all of humanity, rendering everyone perfectly pleasant and always blissed out. Everyone loses his and her individuality, and becomes part of a cooperative hive mind. They are effectively zombies, but they come across as the super-nice and helpful neighbor you wish you had. Only a dozen or so people on the entire planet are immune; one of them is Carol Sturka, a grouchy, ex-alcoholic lesbian novelist living in Albuquerque; she’s the kind of character straight out of Percy.
I’m going to write an essay for The Free Press about the show, so I won’t say too much here. The plot is driven by Carol’s quest to find out how to cure humanity of this affliction before they figure out how to overcome her natural resistance to the virus. An interesting twist is that of the others immune to the virus, Carol is the only one who thinks this is an insane, inhuman way to live. Most of the others accept it and conform, finding it pleasant enough; one hedonistic male character revels in the fact that every woman in the world is happily willing to have sex with him, and that the world’s riches are at his fingertips, just for the asking.
Like John the Savage in Brave New World, Carol Sturka is fighting for her right to be unhappy — and for everybody’s right to be unhappy, because somehow, she intuits, our very humanity depends on it. At the end of the most recent episode, Carol’s investigation reveals something dark and horrible at work beneath the global epidemic of niceness; we will find out in today’s episode what that is. If Walker Percy were alive today and writing for television, Carol Sturka would be his hero.
Last time I was home in West Fel, I learned that construction had begun locally on a giant AI data center. Folks are thrilled by the tax revenue that’s going to bring to the parish. Me, I’d love to see the parish flourish, but I also believe that aside from nuclear war, AI is going to be the greatest threat to our humanness in existence.
So, I had this idea that maybe I should just build a cabin on the family land I own there, and move to West Fel to write a modern version of The Thanatos Syndrome. There’s more to it than that. As longtime readers know, the intellectual foundation for my own life was laid in the modest antebellum cabin on family land in which dwelled my Great-Great Aunts Lois and Hilda, born in Starhill (our little part of West Fel) in the 1890s. They had lived long lives of adventure, having served, for example, as Red Cross nurses in Dijon during the Great War. Here’s a photo of their cabin, which was torn down sometime in the 1990s after they died, and the land fell into the hands of some other branch of the family:
I tell you, this was my own version of the magic armoire in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. I spent most of my pre-kindergarten days there with those old ladies. Humble as it was, the cabin was filled with art and books. They would sit with me on their red leather couch, and tell me stories about their adventures in France, in Latin America, and New Orleans. They taught me how to read, and would go through the week’s issue of Time, discussing events of the world with me. It was in that cabin that the foundations of my life as a journalist and European traveler were laid.
I wrote about this experience in a couple of posts on my old Beliefnet blog ages ago (see here and here), though I return to it periodically in this newsletter. Here I am in 1968 with them, outside the cabin. Aunt Hilda is on the left; Aunt Lois on the right:
There is this passage from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming that gives you an idea of the role those women played in forming my imagination:
Sometimes I would sit in Loisie’s lap in the kitchen, not much bigger than a closet, and stir her pecan cookie batter by hand. We would pull sheets of those cookies out of the oven, each one buttery and crisp and about the size of a quarter, and eat them with cold milk on the front porch (or “gallery,” as the old aunts called it, in the antique usage). Often we would sit by the fire and read the newspaper together. I loved the look and sound of those exotic words in the headlines. Kissinger. Moscow. Watergate. I could only intuit it at the time, but these elderly ladies, spending their final years in rural exile, were among the worldliest people I’d ever meet. Hilda, an eccentric Episcopalian, taught herself palm-reading. Scratching her bony finger across my soft pink palm one day, she said, “See this line? You’ll travel far in life.” I hoped it was true.
Lois was an accomplished amateur horticulturalist, and took me with her on strolls in her gardens. There was a large Magnolia fuscata tree in her front yard, with its pale yellow blossoms that smelled of banana. Loisie and I would walk, me holding her hand, past her camellia bushes, the stands of spidery red lycoris, King Alfred daffodils, and jonquils. There was a pear tree, a chestnut, cedars, live oaks, flowering dogwoods, and, towering over the backyard, an old Chinese rain tree, its podlike blossoms puffed like a thousand and one pink lanterns.
There was a king snake that lived in the bushes under the huge magnolia tree in Loisie and Mossie’s yard. Loisie taught me that the old snake was our friend. If he was there, she said, he would keep rattlesnakes away. One day when I was eight, I walked with a friend to the aunts’ cottage, and there was the king snake, black as night and marked by pale yellow runes, stretched across the pea gravel, sunning itself. My friend was paralyzed by fear, but I stepped right over the snake without bothering him. Loisie had said he was our friend, hadn’t she, and inasmuch as she was the happy genius of this grove, who was I to doubt her?
If I were ever to make yet another return to West Feliciana — the previous two ending badly — it would no doubt be the end of my wanderings. It would mean giving up on ever finding a wife again. It would mean consigning myself to the misery of the long, humid Louisiana summers. But there I would write what would surely be my only novel, and maybe it would be an important one. And maybe I could create my own version of the aunts’ cabin, a place where my grandchildren one day could find mystery and magic, and a portal to another world. I think about this a lot, and wonder if I’m just once again fantasizing about returning to the Garden, or to Auden’s “Atlantis”. Or maybe at last, in my sixties, and as the only surviving member of my family (my mother, alas, approaches her 82nd Christmas not long for this world), the time would finally be right for the nostos journey that took. As much as I love Europe, and living in Europe, I cannot fathom growing old and dying outside of the South.
We will see. But I tell you, Walker Percy, his Dr. Tom More, Carol Sturka, technology, and West Feliciana Parish are much on my mind these days. When I head to West Fel in a couple of weeks for Christmas, I’m planning to spend a day re-connecting with an old friend from school days, a writer working on a couple of novels. We’re hoping to get a couple of hotel rooms in St. Francisville, hang out in the bar, drinking bourbon and talking about the South, and writing. Who knows what may be born there?
Today’s newsletter continues for subscribers below the paywall. On the agenda: the world through Russia’s eyes; Pilgrims vs. Tourists; Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, And Marriage. I am so grateful to all you who subscribe — especially those who comment!
