Lancelot by Walker Percy Page B

to me before because I hadn’t told him anything.
    I pondered. Could it be true all one needs to know nowadays is what one wants?
    Leaving the pleached alley of oaks, my usual route, I cut across the meadowlike front yard, took the gardener’s gate through the iron fence, and climbed the levee.
    Believe it or not. I had not seen the river for years. A diesel towboat was pushing an acre of barges against the current. It sounded like a freight engine spinning its wheels. I turned around. Belle Isle looked like an isle, a small dark islet hemmed in by Ethyl pipery, Dow towers. Kaiser stacks, all humming away. Farther away, near the highway, gas burnoffs flared in the night as if giant hunters still stalked the old swamp.
    The stars were dim but by following the handle of the dipper I recognized Arcturus, which my father showed me years ago. My father: a failed man who missed the boat all around but who knew how far away Arcturus was. He was editor of a local weekly, where he published his own poems and historical vignettes about this region on such subjects as St. Andrew’s Chapel: the First Non-Roman Church in the Parish (I remember thinking that my ancestors must have arrived here to find the swamp teeming not with wild Indians but with Romans). The Kiwanis Club gave him a certificate officially entitling him the Poet Laureate of Feliciana Parish. He was an ordinary newspaper poet, an ordinary newspaper historian, and he had an ordinary newspaperman’s wonder about science.
    â€œThink of it,” he said, standing in this spot and showing me Arcturus. “The light you are seeing started thirty years ago!”
    I thought about it. In those days we thought about such things.
    But what I was thinking that night a year ago was not how strange it was that light from Arcturus started out thirty years ago (when we were listening to Parkyakarkus and Frank Mann, the Golden Voice of Radio) but how strangely one’s own life had turned out during these same thirty years while Arcturus’ light went booming down the long, lonesome corridors of space.
    Then for the first time I saw myself and my life just as surely as if I were standing in the dark parlor and watching myself sitting at the table with Margot.
    Do you know what happened to me during the past twenty years? A gradual, ever so gradual, slipping away of my life into a kind of dream state in which finally I could not be sure that anything was happening at all. Perhaps nothing happened.
    That, after all, is quite a discovery for the man you knew, president of the student body, all-conference halfback. Most Likely to Succeed. Rhodes scholar, Golden Glover, holder of the record of the Longest Punt Return in the entire U.S.A.
    Clearly you haven’t done too well either. You know what our trouble was? We liked to go to school too much. And into the service. I managed to stay in school or the service until I was thirty-two. And you with your M.D., D.D. In fact, aren’t you taking some courses at Tulane now?
    I practiced law in a small town on the River Road. I say practice in quotes, so to speak, because I found that I was doing less and less law as time went on. True, times got harder, business was slow. In the end I was doing a couple of hours of title work a day and that was it.
    One good thing about small towns: it was convenient to come home for lunch. Margot was usually there at first. We’d have a drink or two or three before lunch—something she was used to doing with her lady friends in New Orleans. That was a pleasure. After Suellen’s lovely lunch, we often made love. Not a bad life! drink well, eat well, and make love to Margot. I fell into the custom of taking a nap. The naps grew longer. Then one day, I did not go back to the office in the afternoon. Instead, and as an excuse because it was said to be good for one, I took up golf. The three other members of the foursome were Cahill Clayton Lamar, cousin and failed gentry like