The Best Advice I Ever Got on How to Live a Life

Bridges My Father Never Crossed: A Writer in America

We passed this way here once. To those of you who follow, to those of you who care, this is who we were.

This is my story.

It is a story of The South, The Old South, The Deep South.

But it is not a story of the privileged or moneyed South.

I had known some of them, the moneyed, from my days when I was a student at the university in Baton Rouge. They were the elite of New Orleans, children and grandchildren of men whose names were cast in bronze on statuaries near Jackson Square.

My story of The South was a different one from theirs. My father and grandfathers were laborers, men of the fields who made their way with their hands; hard men who had lived hard lives.

I, like they, had been born into the land where Jesus Saves. He would save your soul but little else.

It was the land where poverty all too often stifled, and because of it, opportunities were few. It was the land of trailer houses and turnip greens, where children grow up with ungood teeth.

Gary Bolyer

Clearwater, Florida

Sunday, January 19, 2025

“For some time now the impression has been growing upon me that everyone is dead.
It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt this is death.” ― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” ― Walker Percy, The Moviegoer

“The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair.” ― Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

The best advice I ever got on how to live a life came from one of my professors when I was a student at the university in Baton Rouge.

I don’t remember the professor’s name. I don’t remember what he looked like. I do remember he was a seasoned man, a gifted intellectual who had received his PhD in English Literature from Harvard. And I do remember much of what he had to say to us.