I’ve never before seen Walker Percy speak and am posting this clip, in which he analyzes the diminishing publication prospects for young writers, in case you haven’t either. For some reason his pronounced southern-aristocratic accent surprised me.
I’m also in the midst of watching a longer video in which the author accepts a medal from Notre Dame although he says he doesn’t deserve it. Percy, a latecomer to Catholicism, notes the scarcity of Catholics in the south during his childhood, and recalls that two of his closest friends in medical school were Notre Dame graduates who attended Mass regularly. At the time, he says, he “accepted their strange behavior as yet another Yankee eccentricity.” (He begins speaking about four minutes in.)