This is a book like an ice water bath you are being held in by a vise grip.
I read it for a bookclub and when I questioned the picker:
“ How could you pick a book that I can not talk with my mother about?”
His response was he wondered how many people would be bothered by it and that it was the right kind of ruffling.
Love in the Ruins is fleshy. It goes out of the way to mark every physical detail and every personal response and note the depravity and sentimentalism running around hand in hand. The main character is plagued by lust and alcohol in a world that is more than happy to give him that even though he is going to destroy himself, possibly with allergic reactions to gin, possibly by ticking off the wrong girl’s father. But he has achieved the ability to adjust the soul and bring it into harmony with the switch of a button.
Percy’s theory is we disengage with reality, moving outside ourselves like deforming your muscles around an injury. But in this we deform the shape of our soul. Percy’s solution is to make you confront the world as it is, trying to yank you, the reader, into the reality of the way God made the world. And I really want him to stop - it is acutely uncomfortable and does not stop.
We get by through not thinking about the way the world is - turning ourselves into the angel (pure rationality) or the beast (pure impulse) - Sherlock Holmes or Sigmund Freud.
I know who I would rather be on that list.
Percy argues that is a deformity of the creational order of the soul. We are meant to bring both together, ruling the beasts and judging the angles.
But you can not do either if you will not see.
I get it. It is the occupational therapy of the soul, awkward and unnatural with the goal of making the natural wake up.
I made notes about Albion, Gone With the Wind, and Mark Twain, but that may have been trying to escape the bloodbath.
“Don't tell me the U.S.A. went down the drain because of Leftism, Knotheadism, apostasy, pornography, polarization, etcetera etcetera. All these things may have happened, but what finally tore it was that things stopped working and nobody wanted to be a repairman.”
“Books matter. My poor wife, Doris, was ruined by books, by books and a heathen Englishman, not by dirty books but by clean books, not by depraved books but by spiritual books! God, if you recall, did not warn his people against dirty books. He warned them against high places. My wife, who began life as a cheerful Episcopalian from Virginia, became a priestess of the high places.”
Further up and Further In
Let’s not look back at this one again.
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