Movieless March Posted on March 01, 2015 by Dave Fowler

For the month of March I've decided to watch no movies or TV shows. I really feel the time I spend watching is wasted, but I needed a dramatic goal to kick the habit.

I've titled it Movieless March and with the re-claimed time tonight already, I've finished a great deal of work and started a book that I have been wanting to get to. Serendipitously, the first excerpt of the book is from another titled "The Moviegoer". It is just a fantastic piece for so many reasons that I wanted to share it here:

The Moviegoer

By Walker Percy

What is the nature of the search? you ask.

Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. This morning, for example, I felt as if I had come to myself on a strange island. And what does such a castaway do? Why, he pokes around the neighborhood and he doesn't miss a trick.

To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.

The movies are onto the search but they screw it up. The search always ends in despair. They like to show a fellow coming to himself in a strange place -- but what does he do? He takes up with the local librarian, sets about proving to the local children what a nice fellow he is, and settles down with a vengeance. In two week's time he is so sunk in every dayness that he might just as well be dead.

What do you seek -- God? you ask with a smile.

I hesitate to answer, since all other Americans have settled the matter for themselves and to give such an answer would amount to settling myself a goal which everyone else has reached -- and therefore raising a question in which no one has the slightest interest. Who wants to be dead last among one hundred and height million Americans? For, as everyone knows, the polls report that 98 percent of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2 percent are atheists and agnostics -- which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker. For myself, I enjoy answering polls as much as anyone and take pleasure in giving intelligent replies to all questions.

Truthfully, it is the fear or exposing my own ignorance which constrains me from mentioning the object of my own search. For, to begin with, I cannot even answer this, the simplest and most basic of all questions: Am I, in my search, a hundred miles ahead of my fellow Americans or a hundred miles behind them? This is to say: Have 98 percent of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?

On my honor I do not know the answer.