Percy’s diagnosis was that when we are mired in the everydayness of ordinary life, we are susceptible to what he called “the malaise,” a free-floating despair associated with the feeling that you’re not a part of the world or connected to the people in it. You are alienated, detached. As Percy put it in “The Moviegoer,” “The malaise has settled like a fallout and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall.” The heroes of his books, each in his own way, embark on a search for the cause and cure of this syndrome. “What is the nature of the search?” wonders Binx Bolling, the narrator of “The Moviegoer.” “The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

A real-world crisis can provide a respite from the malaise. Binx first became aware of the possibility of overcoming alienation when he was wounded during the Korean War. “I vowed that if I ever got out of this fix, I would pursue the search,” he recalls. “What are generally considered to be the best of times are for me the worst times, and that worst of times was one of the best.” He is reminded of this when he has the good fortune to get into a minor accident when driving with a girlfriend on the Gulf Coast. “How, you might wonder, can even a minor accident be considered good luck? Because it provides a means of winning out over the malaise.”

That’s what makes hurricanes therapeutic. “Why is a man apt to feel bad in a good environment, say suburban Short Hills, N.J., on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon?” Percy wrote in one of his essays. “Why is the same man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane?” Part of the answer is that when a hurricane is about to hit, we no longer feel uncertain about our role in the world. Everyone is focused, connected, engaged. We know what we’re supposed to do, and we do it.

But Percy’s theory about the redemptive power of hurricanes goes beyond the fact that dangerous situations allow us to become action heroes or saints. “True, people help each other in catastrophes,” he wrote in “Lancelot.” “But they don’t feel good because they help each other. They help each other because they feel good.” The hurricane blows away our alienation. “I knew a married couple once who were bored with life, disliked each other, hated their own lives, and were generally miserable — except during hurricanes,” Lancelot recounts. “Then they sat in their house at Pass Christian, put a bottle of whiskey between them, felt a surge of happiness, were able to speak frankly and cheerfully to each other, laugh and joke, drink, even make love.”

The problem with storms is that they pass. After the winds subside and the earth begins to heal, the malaise and alienation creep back. The last time I saw Walker Percy, he made that point. He was fighting prostate cancer, but he faced his end with the inner calm of the deeply faithful. As he sat on his dock, his face was as placid as the Bogue Falaya, rippled occasionally by a smile. He reminded me of what had happened with the couple in Lancelot. “After the hurricane they took a good hard look at each other on a sunny Monday morning and got a divorce.”