Percy on "Novel-Writing in an Apocalyptic Time"

From a 1986 essay by Walker Percy:

Everyone remembers exactly where he was and what he was doing when Kennedy was shot -- how places and things and people and even green leaves seemed to be endowed with a special vividness, a memorable weight.  But what the novelist is interested in is the in-between times, the quality of ordinary Wednesday afternoons, which ought to be the best of times, but are, often as not, times when places, people, things, green leaves seems to be strangely diminished and devalued.

Could it be that his paradoxical diminishment of life in the midst of plenty, its impoverishment in the face of riches, is the peculiar vocation of the novelist to catch a glimpse of, by reason of his very dislocation, but also because none of the experts seem to recognize its existence, let alone explain it?  There is something worse than being deprived of life:  it is being deprived of life and not knowing it.