The Last Gentleman - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Walker Percy (~ ~ ~) #1

Walker Percy
The Last Gentleman

FOR BUN

If a man cannot forget, he will never amount to much.

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

… We know now that the modern world is coming to an end … at the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies … Loneliness in faith will be terrible. Love will disappear from the face of the public world, but the more precious will be that love which flows from one lonely person to another … the world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.

Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World

~ ~ ~

The characters in this novel are fictional. No real persons are portrayed. The places do not necessarily correspond to geography. That is to say, New York is New York, but localities in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana have been deliberately scrambled. For example, the Southern city herein set forth bears certain resemblances to Birmingham. But the nearby university is more like the state institution in Mississippi. The town of Shut Off, Louisiana, is not across the Mississippi River from Vicksburg. These liberties are taken as a consequence of my impression that this region as a whole, comprising parts of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, shares certain traits which set it apart from much of the United States and even from the rest of the South.