Toward the end of the Walker Percy Weekend panel on a sense of place, the exchange among panelists Peter Lawler, Caleb Stegall, and Bill McClay made me think about how difficult it is for any of us to be satisfied in place.

During Q&A, someone in the audience made the point that restless intellectual types from small towns often don’t fit in because the people among whom they were born and raised sense, somehow, that their questioning nature contains within it the seeds of the local society’s destruction. That’s true. The inability to be satisfied can be a destructive force.

Listening to the discussion that followed, it occurred to me that the opposite is also true: that the reflexive conservatism of small towns also contains within it the seeds of the local society’s destruction. The inability to imagine a different way of life can prevent a society from being resilient enough to change to meet the challenges facing it.

The art of living in place — any place — is knowing what to conserve, what to change, and the right time to do either. And not just living in a geographical place. We have to know too what to change within ourselves, and when to change it, so that we can flourish.

How difficult it is for us to be satisfied with our place — geographically and otherwise — and how hard it is to live a life of perpetual dissatisfaction, an unslakeable thirst that disturbs our peace. This is built into our natures, I guess. Late last night, as the Percy festival events wound down, a festivalgoer and friend from New Orleans said his wife’s belief is that we cannot be satisfied until we rest in God — a conviction that goes back at least as far as St. Augustine, of course. But it’s true. We cannot be satisfied with anything less than unity with God, which is impossible to achieve fully in this life. Our unhappiness comes from putting other things in the place of God. As Piccardà says in Dante’s Paradiso, “In His will is our peace.” This is very, very hard for any of us, no matter how pious, to say this side of heaven.

Trying to connect that airy sentiment with how you get through the day if you live in a despairing place is hard. Someone who came to the Percy festival told me that ours is a pretty little town with happy people, but so many small towns in the South are not like this. They are places of decrepitude and lifelessness (he lives in such a place, he told me). I know what he’s talking about; I’ve driven through towns like this in my travels over the past couple of years, and I’ve reflected on how very different my life would have been had I not had a good place to come back to. Here’s the question: are people who live in crappy places but who are content truly alive, spiritually, because they have the peace that surpasses all understanding — or are they in despair, and don’t know it? Percy writes, in The Second Coming:

The lives of other people seemed even more farcical than his own. It astonished him that as farcical as most people’s live were, they generally gave no sign of it. Why was it that it was he not they who had decided to shoot himself? How did they manage to deceive themselves and even appear to live normally, work as usual, play golf, tell jokes, argue politics? Was he crazy or was it rather the case that other people went to any length to disguise from themselves the fact that their lives were farcical? He couldn’t decide.

Hey, I’m going to be on the road to and from Shreveport today; I’ll be signing copies of Little Way at the Methodist conference out by Centenary. This means 10 hours of driving, in total. It’s going to be a light posting day on the blog, and I won’t be able to approve comments with customary dispatch. Thanks for your patience.