The Horizontal Search

I just fin­ished read­ing The Movie­goer, by Walker Percy, and I can’t believe no one insisted I read it long ago. I’m glad it hap­pened now, though. When it was first pub­lished, in 1960, a reviewer called it “a Catcher in the Rye for adults only.” It’s a friv­o­lous, but (I think) apt review. I don’t know if I’m an adult. I’m not as old as the char­ac­ters in this novel, but I feel the same very lucid lone­li­ness that they do. That lit­tle sen­tence on the back cover made me feel like part of the club. A wink, a parted cur­tain, arms ush­er­ing me in, and there it is: my newly acknowl­edged adulthood.

This book really felt like a rite of pas­sage. It was like Binx and Kate were show­ing me how I would one day have to face life, too. I was calmed by their com­pro­mises and ratio­nal­iza­tions, their cool self-assessments and relent­less despair. They were unapolo­get­i­cally hon­est. There were so many things they said that I wanted to hold onto, mem­o­rize, save for every birth­day. The thing is, I have real issues with get­ting older. These char­ac­ters didn’t entirely quell my fears, but they gave me hope. If noth­ing else, their lives are con­sis­tently wakeful.

Binx’s pri­mary con­cern? To live Some­where and not Any­where. Also, the Hor­i­zon­tal Search. He has com­pleted his Ver­ti­cal Search, or, rather, there is nowhere else to go. The Ver­ti­cal Search is focused, specific:

:as you get deeper into the search, you unify. You under­stand more and more spec­i­mens by fewer and fewer for­mu­lae. There is the excite­ment. Of course, you are always after the big one, the new key, the secret lever­age point, and that’s the best of it

.

As he explains it:

Dur­ing those years I stood out­side the Uni­verse and sought to under­stand it. I lived in my room as an Any­one liv­ing Any­where and read fun­da­men­tal books and only for diver­sion took walks around the neigh­bor­hood and saw an occa­sional movie:.It seemed to me that the main goals of my search were reached or were in prin­ci­ple reachable:The only dif­fi­culty was that though the Uni­verse had been dis­posed of, I myself was left over.

Thus, he starts to wan­der seri­ously, and go to movies fre­quently, and watch the migra­tion of light on his desk.

I muse along as qui­etly as a ghost. Instead of try­ing to sleep I try to fathom the mys­tery of this sub­urb at dawn.

In his Hor­i­zon­tal Search he is acutely aware of places. He can’t visit a place–even a movie theater–without gath­er­ing some of the his­tory, befriend­ing a local and ground­ing him­self. He wants to be inside the Uni­verse, with all its force­ful lim­i­ta­tions on the indi­vid­ual. With­out shame, he begins to rel­ish the hap­pi­ness offered by a healthy pur­suit of money and by lust.

I don’t think the intent was to glo­rify the Hor­i­zon­tal Search. I think Percy just wanted to acknowl­edge it, to rede­fine what most of us con­sider lazy, stu­pid, weak and low brow. Its not about being sat­is­fied with less, so much as it’s about being sat­is­fied with what sat­is­fies you. I appre­ci­ate this. I think is very much a part of becom­ing an adult.

Read The Movie­goer. I think it will mean very dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent people.

P.S. (An Incom­plete Thought):

After read­ing The Movie­goer, I real­ized that my favorite sto­ries are of lonely, older men who are selec­tively sen­ti­men­tal. They tear-up at imper­sonal details, but remain numb to most of the world. They are, as Percy’s Binx is, clin­i­cal observers of every­day life who couldn’t hack it as actual sci­en­tists. The migra­tion of sun­light on a desk dis­tracts them for hours. They’re not earnest or full of wonder—they are just look­ing about. That’s not to say they’re indif­fer­ent. They feel lots of things—like lone­li­ness, for instance—but they no inter­est in explain­ing their feel­ings. Although, they might like some­one else to explain them.

These lonely older men (I guess some of them aren’t that old, but they’re at least washed up) gen­er­ally have a female coun­ter­part that the story revolves around. They’re invari­ably ”˜girls’ with heavy, eclips­ing char­ac­ters. I like them as much as the men, if not more. There’s Franny and Zooey, Brett and Jake (of The Sun Also Rises), Daisy and Gatsby, and, maybe less so, Nicole and Dick (of Ten­der is the Night). And now, my lat­est infat­u­a­tion, Kate and Binx. The authors, or nar­ra­tors, spend the length of a novel blam­ing and wor­ship­ing their ”˜girls’. She is not rescued–He never really tries (excep­tion: Nicole and Dick).