When is it okay to be called a slut? When the word "book" precedes it. Which is where I got the news of this previously unpublished Walker Percy interview:
In writing novels I often find that it works to turn things upside-down and to set forth a character, say, a woman with severe free-floating anxiety as more interesting, more hopeful, possessing greater possibilities than, say, another perfectly adjusted symptom-free woman. To say this is to say a good deal more than that illness is more interesting than health.
Q: The work of Gabriel Marcel has had a tremendous impact on your philosophy. For Marcel, hope - real hope - lives only in the face of near impossibility or real despair. Is your hope of this variety? For what do you hope? And how does hope differ from faith?
WP: I would agree with Marcel that even in the worst of times - for example, in the twentieth century, when man is behaving at his most perverse, apparently intent on self-destructing - there is always an extraordinary trait in man of paradox...
Faith, I would think, is the actual belief that what one hopes for is attainable. A man dying of thirst in the desert may hope for water and have no faith that he will get it. But suppose there is a second man, who stands atop the next dune and makes a signal to him, perhaps with semaphores, signifying two H's and an O. Now the first man is entitled to faith.
Writers are the "Protestants" of art, with nothing but their Scripto pencils and Blue-Horse tablets; painters are the "Catholics," with concrete intermediaries, clay, paint, models, fruit, landscape, etc. This is why writers drink more and painters live longer.
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