Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 116

Modern Age

*

Winter 2018

In The Last Gentleman, Walker Percy's character Will Barrett tries
desperately to outrun his Mississippi family's Christ-haunted,
death-dealing past, but he is ceaselessly driven back to his ancestral origins. After a troubled stint at Princeton and hiding out as a
building engineer in New York, a mentally disordered Will returns
to the South. Toward the end, Will finds himself one night outside
his family's old home. And there, standing under its ancient trees,
he stumbles across an almost submerged hitching post that his
grandfather and father had once used, and he is momentarily
transferred to their memories. But he loses hold of the iron post
too quickly, and his consciousness races back to his disordered
present. In a later gloss on this scene, Percy said that the hitching post represented a sacrament of the ordinary. The meaning
contained within its sheer gratuity offers Will clues to who he is
and shows him that his life and his past are a gift that he cannot
unmake. Will, however, was not able to receive this gift. He turns
away from his family and its unique participation in the culture of
the fading old South. Only when compelled to face the demands
of death, as a young boy that he was taking care of succumbs to
leukemia, does Will begin to understand what has preceded and
shaped him.
Tradition gives life because it orders our experience in its
development of our nature with the arts, language, architecture,
culture, and religion, which we might say form a second nature
in us. This is not a call for worthless nostalgia but for a fuller conception of what it means to live as a relational person, one whose
horizon is not limited to the present, as in liberalism, or sacrificed
to the future, as in the progressive mode. And this means that we
embrace the horizon of Burke's intergenerational partnership.
On the other side of Justice Kennedy's radical opening state116

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Modern Age - Winter 2018

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