Word: saneness
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...Percy's last novel Lancelot, the reader can't be sure whether these ideas are the product of a sane mind, ideas with which the author concurs--or whether they are lunatic ravings. It's a very convenient device for Percy. He can say controversial things about war, about Nazis and Jews, about other sensitive subjects and still leave room for himself to disavow then if a reader gets too offended. But in The Second Coming, Percy introduces a new sort of character--the genuine schizophrenic, not a mouthpiece for his own questionable ideas but a true dysfunctional. Allison...
...Americans trying to envision his Administration sometimes find their minds drifting back to the 1950s. Ike, they tell themselves. Maybe, if he won, Ronald Reagan would turn into a kind of Eisenhower. Or at any rate, maybe the effect would be the same: a long quiescence, an essentially sane and minimalist White House presiding over a "normality" that the nation has not experienced for a generation. Even some voters who are chilled by Reagan's politics and his followers have begun to take wistful consolation in the thought that the future under Reagan might be a kind of doubling...
...insufficiently anchored in credibility: his wife, now dead, betrayed him by sharing her love of classical music (which Fischer hated) with a lowly male clerk. The doctor's overresponse seems mad, while much of the novel's power stems from the likelihood that he is sane. This confusion may be irritating on the surface; it also serves the author's purpose perfectly. Doctor Fischer coexists. He chases the very vision of infinite betrayal that will confirm his trust; he pursues evil in the hope of finding its limit, and good on the other side. He meets himself...
...Will the Third World rejoice in America's rediscovery of the sacredness of life and the possibilities of human community unless this is accompanied by an end to multinational megacorporate exploitations? And just how are we to cross over to the glimmering future of a democratic, decentralized, cooperative, ecologically sane society when the proliferation of the tools of planetary annihilation proceeds ever faster...
...crumbling factories, the dying nation-states, the obsolescent oil derricks. Look to the bright, shining future. "In the very midst of destruction and decay, we can now find striking evidences of birth and life...Indisputably--with intelligence and a modicum of luck--the emergent civilization can be made more sane, sensible, and sustainable, more decent and democratic than any we have every known...