The idea of an apocalypse is usually associated with violence, war, and chaos—both natural and otherwise. But not every ending of the world is carried out like some nuclear Ragnorak. 
Some deaths are violent, but the saddest deaths are often the ones witnessed over the passing of many diseased and impotent years. And it is this sort of death which Walker Percy observed clinically in the apocalyptic middle-to-late years of 20th century America. For Percy, the most obvious sign of this apocalypse was the pervasive, obsessive way in which Americans wanted merely to desire and to find something ultimately fulfilling and worth wanting. Desire was (and is) a precious commodity, something both cheaply bought and rarely durable. The cliché of American life is the idea of the search, the journey to self-hood and self-expression and self-worth and self-immortalization. There must be something more, no? This is enough to qualify an American as “spiritual.”
For Walker Percy and the generations of the second half of the 20th century, the utopian memories of the old modern world had turned sour. The structure of an older Christendom had been demolished on the promise that the new modern order would replace it with a new and improved structure—one built on autonomous reason and the brotherhood of secular man. When this structure failed to materialize (and in fact was violently parodied in the myths of fascism and communism), modern man had to find something to fill the void. In a 1950 work, Catholic priest and academic Romano Guardini indulged in a little prophetic discourse: "We know now that the modern world is coming to an end… at the same time, the unbeliever will emerge from the fogs of secularism. He will cease to reap benefit from the values and forces developed by the very Revelation he denies.” The new world, stripped of both Christianity and modernism will see love disappear from the public view as a principle of social order. “The world to come will be filled with animosity and danger, but it will be a world open and clean.”
Walker Percy’s early years followed the stereotypical trajectory of many of his generation—the orphans of modernism. His father committed suicide when Percy was thirteen. Two years later, his mother drove her car off a bridge, which Percy believed to be an act of suicide. Percy spent the remainder of his childhood with his uncle, William Alexander Percy, who introduced him to the world of literature and art. Shortly after graduating medical school at Columbia University 1941 and beginning an medical internship, Percy contracted tuberculosis. It was during the two years of his bed-ridden stay at a sanatorium in upper New York that Percy first confronted his own spiritual problem. Isolated from any normal human community, Percy came to realize that his own designs for a career in medicine had to be given up. He wrote that the condition of modern alienation struck him very practically—any pretense of comfort which was promised by modern life and science had been stripped away from him in his illness. Convalescing in a sanitarium, there was no way for Percy to hide from the fact that he had no real experience of meaning or community. During this period, he had the chance to turn to philosophy and authors like Soren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevsky, who first planted the seeds of doubt that modern science could provide all the answers to man’s problems. Percy’s medical background and scientific training had taught him that the material world and the spiritual world (if it even existed) were separated by an infinite gulf. After his conversion to Roman Catholicism around 1947, Percy turn his clinical attention away from medicine, and directed it instead toward the soul—which had been unceremoniously quarantined from the body by Descartes. Percy sees this dualism of soul and body as the fundamental cause of the modernist crisis:
All the Americans I know are Cartesians without having read a word of Descartes…. An educated American believes that everything can be explained “scientifically,” can be reduced to the cause and effect of electron, neurons, and so forth. But at the same time, each person exempts his own mind from this, as do scientists. I see this endemic Cartesianism, and my criticism is that it leaves us without a coherent theory of man. Consequently, modern man is deranged.
This derangement, for Percy, is the ultimate expression of modernism and the prophetic whisper of a quietly approaching apocalypse—the kind which destroys the world, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
