I Was Binx Bolling →

From Garden & Gun (I never get tired of that magazine’s name) comes Doug Marlette’s wonderful account of meet and interviewing Walker Percy. I had no idea that Percy used to vacation in Highlands, North Carolina, in the same county that my grandparents have their cabin.

Happy accidents

Someone has been driving Binx Bolling’s car around here — a bright red MG-A, shiny as though it’s 1961 and the car has just rolled out of the showroom. I keep seeing it parked on the street in front of a small park, the sunlight gleaming off its curves and chrome. It’s such a fundamentally happy car, in that I can’t help but smile when I see it, and I suppose that’s why Binx likes it. No matter how stuck in despair he feels he can always close the office up early, strap his suitcase to the back rack, and go spinning along.

There’s a scene in The Moviegoer where Binx and his secretary are driving on a coastal road and get in a minor accident. Binx is happy that it happens, because the collision snaps him out of the everydayness of the situation. Something that he’s done over and over again — trying to seduce one of his secretaries — becomes new and uncharted.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that this past week — even before Binx started parking his car near my office. Some misfortunes can in fact be fortunate, because they direct us in other directions. A little adversity can cause us to dig in and try harder than we have before. Disrupting a routine can invest the entire routine with a newfound sense of purpose.

So, this is the point: I finished writing this novel I’ve been working on and thinking about for years. I am very happy about that, but I know I’m not done yet. I haven’t settled into a routine yet, the entire time I’ve been working on it. I’m still discovering, still working, still making it new. Very little in it has worked out the way I wanted it to, but then again all of it has worked out the way I wanted it to, because here there is — it’s finished. But then it’s not finished, because it still needs a lot of fixing and rewriting and rearrangement.

"A person in despair wants despairingly to be himself…. The self which, in his despair, he wants to be is the self he is not (indeed, to want to be the self he truly is, is the very opposite of despair)…. To be ‘self’ in the way he wants to be it, that would be — even if in another sense just as despairing — everything he desired; but to be forced to be ‘self’ in a way that he doesn’t want to be, that is his torment — not being able to be rid of himself."

Soren Kierkegaard explains The Sickness unto Death. Binx Bolling’s “search” is just a way to rid himself of the despair he feels in his everyday life — the despair that comes from the gap between the life he lives (despite how happy he claims to be) and the life he and his aunt etc. feel he should be living.

"The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life…To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair."

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer (via sherry, via binxbolling)

Trailer for Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, directed by Win Riley. I just found out about this and I am SO PUMPED. Click through to YouTube to watch it in HD.

As soon Binx’s car started up at the beginning, I was hooked. And to hear Richard Ford read from The Moviegoer — man. I am a total fanboy. (Via Maud Newton)

"If a better book than The Moviegoer has been written, I’ll cut off my little toe."

Ada Liana Bidiuc, as quoted in Oxford American’s Best Southern Novels of All Time.

"In the evenings I usually watch television or go to the movies. Weekends I often spend on the Gulf Coast. Our neighborhood theater in Gentilly has permanent lettering on the front of the marquee reading: Where Happiness Costs So Little. The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie. Other people, so I have read, treasure memorable moments in their lives: the time one climbed the Parthenon at sunrise, the summer night one met a lonely girl in Central Park and achieved with her a sweet and natural relationship, as they say in books. I too once met a girl in Central Park, but it is not much to remember. What I remember is the time John Wayne killed three men with a carbine as he was falling to the dusty street in Stagecoach, and the time the kitten found Orson Welles in the doorway in The Third Man."

The Moviegoer, natch. “Where Happiness Costs So Little” is such a great line; I’m going to have to use it somewhere. (via The Second Pass)

"My aunt and uncle live in a gracious house in the Garden District and are very kind to me. But whenever I try to live there, I find myself first in a rage during which I develop strong opinions on a variety of subjects and write letters to editors, then in a depression during which I lie rigid as a stick for hours staring straight up at the plaster medallion in the ceiling of my bedroom."

I am reading The Moviegoer again.

Walker Percy on Kierkegaard The Moviegoer is probably my favorite novel — I try to read it at least once every 12 months. The first time I read it, I was also reading Kierkegaard. I had no idea that Binx’s Kierkegaardian worldview came along almost by accident.