Knowing & Walker Percy

I went to see Knowing yesterday on the good advice of Roger Ebert. Nicholas Cage plays an MIT physicist who unravels a series of numbers on a sheet of paper from a time capsule buried 50 years prior that is predicting accurately catastrophic events. An interesting movie, but the ending seemed a might contrived in terms of effecting a movie-audience catharsis. And I'm always leery about calling in aliens to rescue things, deus ex machina.

Nevertheless, I am one of those readers/viewers whom Walker Percy described so accurately in both his fiction and non-fiction. I like a lonely scientifically oriented bloke (or gal for that matter) who is making connections that others find incredible or that strain conventional wisdom. A story is better yet if said scientifically minded fellow finds his positivist presuppositions just don't match reality and he must admit old Will Shakespeare's dictum:

There are more things in heaven and earth ...
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Even better if he can witness or take an unwilling part in bringing down a gaggle of hubris filled politicians who think they have monolithic control of matters. Best of all if he has fallen in with a motley of unlikely stragglers - we few, we happy few - with whom to face an uncertain series of events that with seeming coincidence but betray a providential hand. And if he has been rejected or cast off or left behind somehow by his professional colleagues (Ah, yes. Poor So-and-so. Too bad about him. Had such a brilliant career, it seemed, before he put his foot in it.), then he is truly the protagonist for me.

So this Easter break I am reading The Thanatos Syndrome in which Dr. Thom More is taking stock of things in Louisiana after spending two years in the Fed for a minor narcotics charge and conviction.
And what does Walker Percy throw in? How about the following:

The great American philosopher, Charles Sanders Pierce, said that the most amazing thing about the universe is that apparently disconnected events are in fact not, that one can connect them ...

and

Azazel is, according to Hebrew and Canaanite belief, a demon who lived in the Syrian desert, a particularly barren region where even God's life-giving force was in short supply. God told Moses to tell Aaron to obtain two goats for a sacrifice, draw lots, and allot one goat to Yahweh as a sacrifice for sin, the other goat to be marked for Azazel and sent out into the desert, a place of wantonness and freedom from God's commandments, as a gift for Azazel.

Mohammedans believe that Azazel is a jinn of the desert, formerly an angel. When God commanded the angels to worship Adam, Azazel replied, "Why should a son of fire fall down before a son of clay?" Whereupon God threw him out of heaven and down into the Syrian desert, a hell on earth. At that very moment his name was changed from Azazel to Eblis, which means despair.

Milton made Azazel the standard-bearer of all the rebel angels.

Walker Percy was on to something. Yes he was.