"More than anything else, he wished to act with honor and to be thought well of by other men. So living for him was a strain. He became ironical. For him it was not a small thing to walk down the street on an ordinary September morning. In the end he was killed by his own irony and sadness and by the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor."
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— Walker Percy, The Last Gentleman, p. 16.
Here we go. Percy’s writing on honor—particularly the essay “Stoicism in the South”—is required reading.