Postmodern Pilgrim?

The winter blast annihilated our little garden. It probably undid all of my rye-seeding efforts last weekend, too. But I welcome this minute arctic reminder with all of my heart. The cold has it's own beauty, and I am prepared to embrace it. So, I tell myself, now is the time to finish that book you were enjoying in the summer, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, by Paul Elie. Perhaps I can finish it over the weekend, just in time to commemorate Thomas Merton on Sunday night. The book, you see, traces the artistic lives of Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy.

[prepare for a long blog]

Merton (as quoted in the book) speaks of pilgrimage:

Man instinctively regards himself as a wanderer and wayfarer, and it is second nature for him to go on pilgrimage in search of a privileged and holy place, a center and source of indefectible life. This hope is built into his psychology, and whether he acts it out or simply dreams it, his heart seeks to return to a mythical source, a place of 'origin,' the 'home' where the ancestors came from, the mountain where the ancient fathers were in direct communication, the place of the creation of the world, paradise itself, with its sacred tree of life.

It is Walker Percy, however, that truly grabs me today. Continuing with the pilgrimage theme:

He (Percy) tells the story of an American couple on their honeymoon in Mexico. Having come so far, they find themselves in a tourist town among "a dozen other couples from the Midwest." Dismayed, they leave the town, get lost, and stumble on some natives performing a "corn dance" in a remote village. "The couple know at once that this is 'it'. They are entranced. They spend several days in the village, observing the Indians and being themselves observed with friendly curiosity." But have they really escaped the falsity of modern life? By no means. They announce the ritual's authenticity to each other, as if to verify it. They find they are eager for it to end -- to end before its authenticity is somehow spoiled. Back home in America, they tell an ethnologit friend about it, eager to have an expert say that it is authentic; the next year, they return, bringing the ethnologist with them. He watches; they watch him. "'Didn't we tell you?' they say at last. What they want from him is not ethnological explanations; all they want is his approval."

Percy's point -- in the language of pilgrimage -- is that the modern predicament makes pilgrimage impossible. In the modern world (now generally called postmodern), all experience is always secondhand, planned and described for one's consumption by others in advance. Even the rare authentically direct experience is spoiled by modern self-consciousness. The modern person is doomed to an imitation of life; the self cannot escape itself and know the world or the Other.

and at his acceptance speach in 1961 for National Book Award for fiction:

"There is time to say only this: that the pathology in this case has to do with the loss of individuality and the loss of identity at the very time when words like the 'dignity of the individual' and 'self-realization' are being heard more frequently than ever."

In five minutes, Percy set out the themes he had explored over a dozen years: the sickness of modern Western society, the loss of the sense of self, the role of the writer as diagnostician. Concluding, he made his main point indirectly, as an offhand sequitir -- the point that "in short, the book [The Moviegoer] attempts a modest restatement of the Judeo-Christian notion that man is more than an organism in an environment, more than an integrated personality, more than a mature and creative individual, as the phrase goes. He is a wayfarer and a pilgrim."