The salesman has no such trouble. Like many businessmen, he is a better metaphysician than the romantic. For example, he gives me a sample of his product, a simple ell of tempered and blued steel honed to a two-edged blade. Balancing it in his hand, he tests its heft and temper, The hand knows the blade, practices its own metaphysic of the goodness of the steel.

Businessmen are our only metaphysicians, but the trouble is they are one-track metaphysicians.

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

It was ten years ago that I last rode a train, from San Francisco to New Orleans, and so ten years since I last enjoyed the peculiar gnosis of trains, stood on the eminence from which there is revealed both the sorry litter of the past and the future bright and simple as can be, and the going itself, one’s privileged progress through the world.

— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

…it is no small thing for me to make a trip, travel hundreds of miles across the country by night to a strange place and come out where there is a different smell in the air and people have a different way of sticking themselves into the world. It is a small thing to him but not to me. It is nothing to him to close his eyes in New Orleans and wake up in San Francisco and think the same thoughts on Telegraph Hill that he thought on Carondelet Street.

— 

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

It is something how travel can bring forth from within us a new self, shaped like the old but resonating at a slightly different frequency somehow, as if some otherness in the very air of this new place we find ourselves has seeped into our personality and temporarily dyed it a new color. I am sure that people who travel often build up an immunity top this sort of thing, a sort of travelling salesmen’s trick to keeping one’s personality in permanent suspension, but I am not at all convinced that there is any benefit to that.

If I did not talk to the theater owner of ticket seller, I should be lost, cut off metaphysically speaking. I should be seeing one copy of a film that might be shown anywhere and at any time. There is a danger of slipping clean out of space and time. It is possible to become a ghost and not know whether one is in downtown Loews in Denver or suburban Bijou is Jacksonville. So it was with me.

— 

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

There is no artistic medium which so completely severs an individual from his environment and his singular existence; the darkened movie theater erases any sense of being a whole and distinct individual, and, in exchange for granting viewers the illusion that reality is being created on a giant screen before them, requires that they temporarily forget the reality that surrounds them. When I was in Anaheim last weekend a couple of us went to see Wolverine (which sucked), and partway through it felt the tremors of an earthquake centered in LA. Nothing reminds you quite so abruptly of which is the more potent reality as when the very ground rebels beneath you.

The truth is I dislike cars. Whenever I drive a car, I have the feeling I have become invisible.

— 

Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

My least favorite thing about living on Long Island is the need to drive everywhere. Even a trip to a local store, and between the local stores themselves, requires driving. Not that it’s always so unenjoyable; sometimes a long unintterrupted drive on a clear summer night with the radio turned all the way up can be magnificent. But when a simple 5 minute trip is transformed by traffic into 30 minutes of being caged in your anonymous little vehicular prison, cut off from civilization as if you were Crusoe on his island, it really makes you long for the relative communal paradise that is mass transit.