Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
I
I am against book reviews in principle, but cash prizes are okay.
Book reviews present substance without form, idea without expression. Take all the ideas from an author, paraphrase them, and then criticize your strawman. You can demerit the greatest pieces of literature because all you have to do is make fun of your cliffnotes version of it. People say not to quote out of context. Impossible. The context for a statement in a book is the book.
It could conceivably work for the driest pieces of writing like an essay. But I hate taking my own advice so instead I chose the most eccentric, strange, and uncomparable book I have read, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self Help Book by Walker Percy.
I read Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy for the first time as a teenager. It was to me what The Catcher in the Rye might be to other teens. And similar to The Catcher in the Rye, the main criticism of it is that it’s trite. That it’s pointlessly existential – look kid, stop sobbing and stop writing rhymeless poetry in your “journal” you got two days ago.
Essentially what I will be presenting is why I think this is not the case, why I think that Cosmos is actually very brilliant even if melodramatic, and how it expresses some real genuine care for people who don’t understand themselves – which, of course, is everyone.
Prelude
Walker Percy once said this about art:
My theory is that the purpose of art is to transmit universal truths of a sort, but of a particular sort, that in art, whether it’s poetry, fiction or painting, you are telling the reader or listener or viewer something he already knows but which he doesn’t quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences a recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so, what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truths which they already unconsciously know.
I would say this is essentially what the book does; I remember first reading it and getting the feeling that I did not completely understand it, but maybe it understood me. And yes, I recognize how existential-teenagery that sounds.
The title page of the book has many alternative titles. Here is one of them:
LOST IN THE COSMOS: THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK
or
Why is it possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you can presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all you life
The book is written as a parody of 80s self-help. At the beginning he offers up a “preliminary short quiz” (6 questions) to determine whether it’s recommended you read the rest of the book. Each question is multiple choice, and follows the format (a), (b), (etc), (CHECK ONE). Percy is deeply existential and mysterious right off the bat. The whole book has a feeling similar to the Twilight Zone (another favorite as a teenager) – creepy and off-putting aesthetics but everywhere a deep moralism behind it all.
The preliminary quiz expands on the self-as-unknowable theme. Some of it is very abstract “food for thought”, and some of it is very concrete examples. For example, he will ask very generic questions like “why can’t you really know yourself like how you can know other people?”, but then also offer up an exercise, like this one:
Think of a few acquantances you don’t really know very well, and try to use five adjectives to describe them, and then rate the degree to which those adjectives apply to them on a finite scale, like +/-10. It is shocking how easy it is to “sum up” people you barely know.
Then, to read the following sentences:
(a) You are extraordinarily generous, ecstatically loving of the right person, supremely knowledgeable about what is wrong with the country, about people, capable of moments of insight unsurpassed by any scientist or artist or writer in the country. You possess an infinite potentiality.
(b) You are of all people in the world probably the most selfish, hateful, envious (e.g., you take pleasure in reading death notices in the newspaper and in hearing of an acquaintance's heart attack), the most treacherous, the most frightened, and above all the phoniest.
Now answer this question as honestly as you can: Which of these two sentences more nearly describes you? CHECK
(a),
(b),
(neither),
(both)
He claims this is actually a real study performed (I have not checked), and that:
If you checked (both) – 60 percent of respondents did – how can that be?
II
If you take the preliminary quiz and you are determined to be a lost self, then begins the greater “20 question quiz”, where he asks about why various “selves” do the things they do and have contradicting desires and actions. Each self has at least one chapter devoted to it, and what seems to be the introductory period of the book is actually made up of the first 12 selves. Between that and the other selves there is a break in the book, what he calls “… an intermezzo of some forty pages, [that] can be skipped without fatal consequences.”
I’ll pick one self that I think is particularly representative of the book (the envious self), but each of these chapters warrants their own discussion (indeed, each one is its own discussion). He opens with some observations and then follows up with a thought experiment. Here are all the selves and their descriptions to give you an idea of the style. His numbering scheme is inconsistent:
(1) Amnesic self – why the self wants to get rid of itself
(2) The self as nought – how the self tries to inform itself by possessing things which do not look like the things they’re used as
The self as nought (II) – why most women, and some men, are subject to fashion
(3) The Nowhere self – How the self, which usually experiences itself as living nowhere, is surprised to find that it lives somewhere
(4) The fearful self – why the self is so afraid of being found out
(5) The fearful self (II) – why the self is so afraid of being stuck with another self
(6) The fearful self (III) – how the self tries to escape its predicament
(7) The misplaced self – how two selves confronting each other can miscalculate, each attributing a putative and spurious reality to the other and trying to match it, with the consequence that both selves become non-selves
(8) The promiscuous self – why is it that one’s self often not only does not prefer sex with one’s chosen mate, chosen for his or her attractiveness and suitability, even when the mate is a person well known to one, knowing of one, loved by one, with a life, time, and family in common, but rather prefers sex with a new person, even a total stranger, or even vicariously through pornography
(9) The envious self (in the root sense of envy: invidere, to look at with malice)– why is it that the self – though it professes to be loving, caring, to prefer peace to war, concord to discord, life to death; to wish other selves well, not ill – in fact secretly relishes war and rumors of war, news of plane crashes, assassinations, mass murders, obituaries, to say nothing of local news about acquaintances dropping dead in the street, gossip about neighbors getting in fights or being detected in sexual scandals, embezzlements, and other disgraces
(10) The bored self – why the self is the only object in the cosmos that gets bored
(11) The depressed self – whether the self is depressed because something is wrong with it or whether depression is a reasonable response to a deranged world
(12) The impoverished self – how the self can be poor through rich
Percy opens his questions about the envious self (9) as such:
Everyone remembers where he was and what he was doing when he heard the news of the Kennedy Assassination – or, if he is old enough, Pearl Harbor.
Why?
…
[a recollection as reported to him]
I was watching the soap opera As the World Turns on TV. It was a scene between Chris Hughes and Grandpa. A bulletin was flashed on the screen. Bulletin: Shots have been fired into the Presidential motorcade in Dallas. As the bulletin came on, Grandpa was saying to Chris Hughes something like: “Now let’s don’t be too hasty, Chris. I don’t believe Ellen would do such a thing.” I can remember thinking how unimportant the soap opera seemed compared with the events in Dallas.
Question: But before that, the soap opera seemed more interesting than the events in Dallas?
Yes.
Question: And since then? Have you resumed watching As the World Turns?
Yes.
The thought experiment:
You are a woman whose husband has taken early retirement. He is a decent fellow, a combat veteran of Korea, and has been a good provider for thirty years. Money is no problem. Now, even though he is seriously overweight, all he does is sit around your pleasant Lake Wales house polishing off six-packs and watching golf, the NBA and NFL on TV. For months he goes without touching you and hardly speaking. Or he’ll have espells of satyriasis when he’ll want to have beery sex twice a night. What do you want (What do women want?) You want to take a cathedral tour of Europe, or a leisurely barge voyage through the canals of France, through the vineyards and kitchens of the Loire Valley. Or visit the Galapagos islands with your local Audubon Society. He won’t go. Why do I want to go look at a bunch of turtles? What does he want? He wants to go to Vegas To catch Wayne Newton and Liberace, or to Augusta to follow Nicklaus. You won’t go. Yet you don’t feel free to go off without him – you have duties as a housewife.
So one day [when you are out] you… get in your care and start home. From the radio comes news of yet another sinkhole in the fragile limestone crust of central Florida. When you arrive in your block, you discover that your entire lot, house, husband Ralph, and the Zenith Chroma-color have dropped out of sight and disappeared forever into the Eocene muck.
This is
(a) Unrelievedly bad news: Ralph, a good man, a good husband, is gone. You, a good Christian woman, have lost your better half. You are alone in the world.
(b) Putatively bad: This is all true, but on the other hand Ralph is gone through no fault of your own and you are free. Frankly, thirty years of Ralph is enough. Moreover, Ralph was well insured.
Percy offers eight such scenarios, some objectively much worse than this one but still more convincing. For example, how would you feel if a colleague whose book outsells yours is involved in a sex scandal and then has their career ruined? What if there was a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah incident: if you are conservative, what if all those cities full of liberal degeneracy and sin suffered a massive earthquake? If you are liberal, what if all those hateful hicks and angry idiots finally got what was coming to them and their welfare states collapsed?
When you read his questions, one after the other, you can’t help but feel guilt. Yes, I do want to be better than others. And if fate knocks the other guy out but I didn’t have anything to do with it, what’s so wrong with me feeling happy about that?
Another example he gives: what if you got shot in the arm on your way to work, before you had to give an important sales presentation? Suppose the wound is non-fatal and easily treatable. You joke with the doctors and come to work late with your arm in a sling. You may feel excited, even relieved. Dare I say proud? Elated? You stroll in there with a high confidence: I was shot at this morning! Even if you totally botch the presentation you might still close the deal simply due to people respecting you.
Many men, including myself, have often thought: although I never wish it to happen, wouldn’t it be kind of cool if a criminal were to attack my family? I could fight him off, beat him to a pulp, and protect my woman and other loved ones. My wife would be crazy about me. Everyone I know would respect me that much more. “hey, that’s Bob Smchob, he killed a guy who was touching his wife and kids.” How would they ever complain to me again?
There was a famous story a while back where a kid fought off a dog that was attacking his sister. Chris Evans gave him a personalized message and a Captain America shield. He was a six and a half year old hero. For the rest of his life he will be heralded by his friends and associates and future employers as “the guy who fought that dog”. His sister getting attacked by a dog is the best thing that ever happened to him. And it’s not like he did anything special: after all, what was he gonna do, just let his sister die? I’d’ve fought it. Anyone would’ve. I wish my family got attacked by a pitbull. I’m jealouser than Hell of that kid.
I’ll paraphrase another question he asks. Say an acquaintance of yours – not a friend, but someone you are associated with and perhaps your friends are friends with – has just learned that they are free of a serious physical ailment, say heart cloggage or somesuch, and that they also received a great promotion and are moving to a new house on the lake. All your friends are very happy for him. “Hey, you hear what happened to Charlie? Isn’t that great?” “Man, Charlie’s really got it made, huh? I guess he’ll live the rest of his heart-healthy life in luxury, eh?”
How does this make you feel?
Would it make you feel better if, suddenly, you see Charlie walking in front of a dump truck, and then you push him out of the way, thus heroically saving his life? If so, why? Why does giving him more good fortune make you less jealous of his good fortune? What if all these good things happened to Charlie but then your friend comes to you, “hey, didja hear what happened to Charlie? He fell off a ladder! His funeral’s this Saturday.”
How can you both want to be a hero and want people to die?
III
It can be hard to tell whether Percy is saying meaningful things or if he’s just being melodramatic with good style. For example, in “The Self as Nought” chapter, he asks why people want to repurpose old junk like a lobster cage or a coca cola sign as a table instead of just having a real table. Here are the answers he offers:
(a) Because people have gotten tired of ordinary tables.
(b) Because the… non-tables converted to use as tables make good conversation pieces.
(c) Because it is a chance to make use of valuable odds and ends which otherwise would gather dust in the attic.
(d) Because the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world, but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.
And so you can read this two ways. You can be like, “he is seriously blowing out of proportion the fact that people want a novel, interesting, table instead of a block of wood”, or you could say, “hey, he’s onto something, at least. Why don’t people just want the most effective table they can get, which has been perfectly satisfactory for thousands of years?”
I would argue Percy is essentially saying, “these first things could be the answer, but aren’t they unsatisfying? Aren’t those the answers that leave you feeling the way that you do? What if it is what you suspect? Why not explore that a little?”
In the same way, you can offer up dozens of matter-of-fact explanations for the envy question that sociologists probably fawn over, for example that humans evolved to both be competitive in some cases and cooperative in other cases (or perhaps that these are just two generic desires with no specific “case” but will at least have good probabilistic overlap with the environment for the “good” of the entire species), and sometimes, especially in modern society, these desires can be mismatched to our new environment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But these seem so unsatisfying. And, what’s more, if they are true, what are we supposed to do? Make meaningless “lifestyle adjustments” while still working a corporate job and participating in near-atomized social groups? Seems like the only thing that would actually make us happy is to go full Unabomber. Or at least Amish, for God’s sake.
The problem is, you can offer up these totally normal-sounding answers for why we have a particular unpleasant or existential feeling, but they never actually make you feel better. So I’m a stressed and anxious monkey with a cell phone. Now I know I’m a stressed and anxious monkey with a cell phone, and guess what? I’m still a stressed and anxious monkey with a cell phone.
IV
Mother Teresa once made a comment about how she thought people in the US seemed extremely poor, poorer than the individuals she dedicated her life to in India. How is it that people with so much can seem so sad?
Percy answers this question with semiotics – the study of signs and symbols. This is when he goes on his optional 40-some pages intermezzo.
People use names to refer to things, and our names cover literally everything in existence – and more (a unicorn, for example). We have names for everything, even the unknown. We call it, “the unknown.” Names make up a frame of reference that we can act in. This is the world of the name givers, to be contrasted to the environment of an organism. Name-givers have literally everything – in their world, whereas organisms only respond to their direct environment.
In order to use a name in common, we have to also share the reality or idea of the referenced in with someone else. Me and you both see an apple, we share the sign apple, and all is well. However, if the reality is not shared, you cannot communicate it. That apple is an apple to you and an apple to me. But consider the only reality we have that is not shared: ourselves (our selves). I am me to me but this same “me” is actually you or him to you. You are not me. We can make up words for the experience of consciousness in general or similar terms, but I am not merely consciousness, I am me. Or at least that’s how it feels.
Previously people could use signs for themselves which were more or less effective because they shared a common reality with their social group. For example the deistic answer was, “I am God, I am the universe”; and the theistic-historical (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) answer was: “I am a self with you under God''. Both are objective descriptions and identities of what the self is. I have something in common with you in your world: a child of God. Therefore the identity crisis is more or less solved; consciousness is the image of God, or consciousness is an illusion.
With the decline of religion, Percy argues that people essentially approach the mystery of their consciousness in one of two ways: they either 1) “accept” their status as in the world, and try to interact with it and other people in it as such, gaining as many perceived goods as they can, or 2) they try to transcend the world, to be or do something more. He describes these two as “immanent” and “transcendent” worldviews.
The immanent worldview has two flavors, the first of which is essentially the “NPC” or “consoomer” meme: you work the most pleasant job you can, you perhaps have a family, and if not, friends and occasional hookups, and you spend most of your time and resources on worldly goods and you drink beer and watch TV. You are a cog in the system, etc.
The other end of the immanent self is the “autonomous self”, who leans into strategizing with the world and optimizes various facets of their life; eg they will exercise, read self-help and implement the strategies to improve their mindset and sex life or parenting skills, and various “discriminating consumership of do-it-yourself hobbies, participatory sports, gourmet cooking, off-beaten-track travel to Katmandu, etc.”
The transcendents also come in two flavors: scientists and artists.
Scientists see the world as cause-and-effect interactions, and thereby transcend it by really understanding what’s going on. They transcend the world and then “go into orbit”, as Percy calls it. The problem comes when you have to come back down. There are often “re-entry” problems, difficulties landing and adjusting back to regular life. Most scientists are fine and merely come across as absent-minded. Some, however, become egotistical and develop a God-complex. He offers an example:
Reentry problems become noticeable in less inspired scientists. The divorced wife of an astronomer at the Mount Wilson Observatory accused her husband of “angelism-bestialism.” He was so absorbed in his work, the search for the quasar with the greatest red shift, that when he came home to his pleasant subdivision house, he seemed to take his pleasure like a god descending from Olympus into the world of mortals, ate heartily, had frequent intercourse with his wife, watched TV, read Mikey Spillane, and said not a word to wife or children.
Scientists can also tend into jealousy, always demanding credit and quotations. And probably most frightening:
More distressing consequences occur when the zeal and excitement of a scientific community runs counter to the interests of the world community, e.g., when scientists at Los Alamos did not oppose the bomb drop over Hiroshima and Nagasaki… As Freeman Dyson put it, the “sin” of the scientists at Los Alamos was not that they made the bomb but that they enjoyed it so much
It’s important to note here that “scientist” and “artist” do not refer specifically only to people in those professions, although it certainly does in part; but rather people who try to transcend the world through those means.
The layman can participate in the scientific community in a limited capacity but usually to greater personal detriment. He uses the example of someone who reads Freud and then applies Freudian theory to every interaction, usually condescendingly. “what you really mean is this…” Think also of the fedora-wearing “I love science” meme.
The artist, Percy says, does not necessarily have specialized knowledge. “Like the scientists, [the artist] transcends in his use of signs. Unlike the scientists, he speaks not merely to a small community of fellow artists but to the world of men who understand him.” The artist is essentially existentialist: he describes “the predicament of the self” to his fellow selves, by speaking the unspeakable to the best of his ability. The artist reaches much higher highs and much lower lows – after you escape everyday life and ascend to the highest planes of being – think of a majestic symphony, the most moving poetry, or an epic and breathtaking novel – you are thrown back into the boring and dreary world: blah.
And so, why are people so poor?
Because the needs of a self in a world are different from the needs of an organism in an environment. The organism is successful insofar as it gains the resources in its environment necessarily for its survival. “under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep”. Whereas a self in a world “is rich or poor accordingly as it succeeds in identifying its otherwise unspeakable self”
The immanent self is impoverished because he believes he has essentially lost all control over his life and “the self sees its only recourse as an endless round of work, diversion, and consumption of goods and services… it sees no way out because it has come to see itself as an organism in an environment and so can’t understand why it feels so bad in the best of all possible environments… and so finds itself secretly relishing bad news, assassinations, plane crashes, and the misfortunes of neighbors, and even comes secretly to hope for catastrophe, earthquake, hurricane, wars, apocalypse – anything to break out of the iron grip of immanence.”
Bureaucracies control everything about your life, you are merely a cog in the machine. You can do anything you want, as long as it’s not important, as the aforementioned Unabomber said. Wouldn’t it be nice if something happened, instead of the day to day superficial drudgeries? At least if a landslide killed your whole family you could do what you want for a change.
The transcendent selves, the scientists and artists, gain pleasure not from “recovery” of self, that is, individual autonomy and identity, but precisely the opposite: the loss of themselves, in their knowledge and in their art. The scientist returns to a near-Edenic state, like Adam naming the animals. Exploring the world through signs with no regard of self. But, unlike Eden, there is no God now, and the transcendence “is so exalted as to be not merely Adam-like but godlike… Freud not only could not get along with the Jewish God but frothed and fell out when rivaled by a fellow transcender like Carl Jung. Two gods in the cosmos is one too many.”
And you read this, and you go, I’ve experienced all these things. There’s a massive letdown after you consume or produce something great. Once I saw the Hitchcock movie Vertigo on the big screen. It was stunning and thrilling and powerful and tense. You feel like the story is the whole world and all the shapes and colors hypnotize you and you forget that you’re sitting next to anyone. Then the movie’s over and the lights turn on and you walk out of the theater and the sun hits your eyes and you’re driving home.
Now what?
I once read all about sociology and evolutionary psychology and various anthropological sciences. It’s fun. You dig really deep into it and learn a lot about societies and how interesting different places are and think you kind of understand people and what makes them tick. Then when people you know talk about nature vs nurture you can offer up impressive sounding names and studies rather than just generic conversation. You feel like you’re a step above. Then you have to do the laundry.
What was the point?
Or the immanent self. You go to work or school. You do your job and take your classes. Why? To pay the bills? Why? To eat and support a family. Why? So you can enjoy their company. Enjoy their company? When? When they’re screaming and keeping you up, or when they’re a literal child and you can’t even have a conversation with them? Or when they’re a teenager and can’t stand you and have nothing in common? Or when they’re an adult and hundreds of miles away? Or when your spouse starts bitching about how you didn’t do some meaningless task?
You’re supposed to work for all that? What should I do, talk to a marriage counselor and become her ivy league university version of an ideal spouse? Isn’t that convenient: I matter, but what I want doesn’t. Maybe I could buy a book on effective parenting techniques? Meditate? Take up fucking rock-climbing or jiu-jitsu? Why would anyone do any of that when there’s TV, the internet, porn, drugs, and alcohol? My wife and kids are on their phones all day, I might as well be, too.
And then it kind of hits you. I’ve been thinking Percy is at least kind of stupid, or over-the-top this whole itme. And maybe he is. But I’m doing what he’s describing. I think he’s stupid and I’m “transcending” him. Does he think he’s transcending me? And now am I gonna think I’m transcending everyone else because I know whether they’re transcending or not?
Absolutely kills any thoughts you had about being smarter than people.
V – The Demoniac Self
The Demoniac self is not exactly what it sounds like. It’s a term borrowed from Kierkegaard, that essentially means the erotic, viewed as a possessive spirit. This is a way of viewing eroticism that he and Percy argue did not exist before Christianity. That is, the Greeks, for example, still had sensuality, obviously, but they did not view it as a thing to be “kept in check”. They saw it as an expression of order and beauty, not a possession of the self. The latter idea is now so ingrained that it’s difficult to think of the word “erotic” without this meaning implicit in it.
The demoniac self is what seems to be central to the book:
…whether one believes in God or not, soul or not, to agree that in an age in which the self is not informed by cosmological myths, by totemism, by belief in God – whether the God of Christianity, Judaism, or Islam – it must necessarily and by reason of its own semiotic nature be informed by something else.
Kierkegaard wrote of the relationship between Christianity and “the spirit of the erotic.” I wonder what he would have made of the influence of the technological revolution on the spirit of the erotic and whether it is a coincidence that this country [USA] is not only the most Christian and most eroticized of all societies but also the most technologically transformed and the most violent. Is there a relationship between the “spirit of the erotic,” technology, and violence?
Percy argues that the modern self is essentially disappointed by everything in modern life. Work is disappointing, family life is disappointing, school is disappointing, politics is disappointing, religion is disappointing, social life is disappointing. All that science has helped us in is a longer and healthier life. And with everything else so disappointing, this leaves us with one respite that we can use and will actually stay exciting if you do it right: recreation.
He says the modes of recreation essentially fall into 5 groups: travel, sports, media, drugs, and sex.
You travel to see a new place, break your habits, maybe become a new person. But as Seneca has noted, travel does little to nothing to cure the soul because you are you no matter where you go.
Sports and the media have become more passive but more exciting. “Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Superbowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game.” Films and TV have become more and more violent. We are fascinated by people who do not even kill for a good cause. Think Clint Eastwood as the man with no name, or the Godfather trilogy.
Drugs are obviously mind altering and never disappointing, but also dangerous and risky.
Then, of course, sex: “By ‘sex’ let us specify the entire spectrum of the erotic, from the ‘romantic’ encounter – cool Audrey Hepburn meeting testy Cary Grant by accident when their dogs’ leashes get entangled on the Left Bank – to the cruising homosexual fellating his five hundredth stranger in Buena Vista Park”
The erotic spirit seems to be the one thing that’s never disappointing. Compare a dry social interaction to an erotic encounter.
Scene in one thousand movies: a party… a failed festival, a collapsed and fragmented community… the exit line in another one-thousand movies: why don’t we get out of here – I know a little Italian restaurant around the corner.
…A quiet place. Two glasses of wine… A touch of arm to arm. A brush of knee against knee. An arrangement: could you meet me at – A liaison…
People are absolutely obsessed, possessed by the erotic. Sometimes it seems like that’s all there is left. Perhaps the next logical question to ask:
suppose the erotic is the last and best recourse of the stranded self and suppose then that, through the sexual revolution, recreational sex becomes available to all ages and all classes. What if then even the erotic becomes devalued? …What then? Does the self simply diminish, subside into apathy like laboratory animals deprived of sensory stimulation? Or does the demoniac spirit of the self, frustrated by the failure of Eros, turn in the end to the cold fury of Saturn?”
It is at that point that you begin to think, “maybe he’s going a little far here. Certainly society is not in shambles? We’re doing OK. We’re all still alive. We’re all still getting along. Once again, maybe don’t go full Unabomber here. Maybe you are trying to be a transcendent artist, like you said.”
And so, Percy acknowledges this. He does it like this, actually:
Hold on, says the reader. Just a minute.
Yes?
Are there not plenty of good people left? Decent folk who have no truck with what you call the spirit of the erotic and the spirit of violence? Millions of people, in fact… who are without exception good, kind, neighborly, generous, patriotic folk?
I am willing to believe it… I am only trying to make sense of a peculiar phenomenon, hardly to be ignored: the sudden and unprecedented appearance of florid sexual behavior and the overt and covert practice of violence to the point of rendering cities unlivable, of nice people like Europeans and Americans killing each other by the millions – and with it, the very real possibility for the first time in history that we may destroy ourselves in the near future.
He then offers a timeline of the history of the demoniac spirit. First, St. Paul, bothered by a “thorn in the flesh”. St Augustine: “grant me the gift of continence, but not just yet.” Dante: sexual sinners in the outermost layer of hell, still in love with each other. Then gradually more and more tolerance to the erotic spirit. Don Giovanni, Fanny Hill. Then:
World War I: …the erotic diminished to the sentimental and to good-natured sex between the doughboy and the French farm girl; with a decline in passion and the spirit of the erotic, and an increase in violence with the rise in technology; 20,000,000 dead.
World War II: Betty Grable, Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, Stalin; the subsidence of the erotic in favor of the dispassionate, abstract violence of ideology, Fascism, Nazism, Communism; war increasingly in the hands of technicians… a transition period between the decline of the Christian era and the rise of the age of technology; 50,000,000 dead.
Period between World War II and World War III: The ascendency of the erotic, the eroticization of all sectors of culture: work and play, films, TV, novels, plays, commercials; yet the sprit of the erotic is still posited and specified by lingering Christianity, e.g., the charm of the secrecy of sex under clothes, the charm of “forbidden” sex, liaisons, pornography…
…the spirit of violence vented in spectatorship sport, either through mass TV viewership or surrogate participation, e.g., 100 million people watching the Superbowl, Little league moms screaming curses at umpires… the ultimate inadequacy of the spectatorship safety vale: thirty-eight dead in a riot at a Buenos Aires soccer game; war.
World War III: The year 2000+, the demoniac spirit of the erotic is no longer posited by Christianity but triumphant in its own right, perfected as genital technique but deprived of the charm of the forbidden, the secret, the “dirty,” “sinful,” “extramarital,” “fornication,” “adultery” – even the word fuck has now lost its homonymous semantic charge and is as neutered as fish, fowl , fix; the perfection of contraceptive technique; the conquest of Herpes II virus and all homosexual “aids” diseases; the perfection of visual and tactile aids (no longer called pornography, from porne, harlot) as sexual stimuli; erotica elevated to a major literary and art form. War without passion: one billion dead.
…
Will the ultimate liberation of the erotic from its dialectical relationship with Christianity result in
(a) The freeing of the erotic spirit so that man- and womankind will make love and not war?
(b) The trivialization of the erotic by its demotion to yet another technique and need-satisfaction of the organism, toward the end that the demoniac spirit of the autonomous self, disappointed in all other sectors of life and in ordinary intercourse with others, is now disappointed even in the erotic, its last and best hope, and so erupts in violence – and in that very violence which is commensurate with the orgastic violence in the best days of the old erotic age- i.e., war?
What if Brave New World is actually better looking than what’s coming? What if people get sick and disappointed and bored, so they turn to what seems to be the final option: violence, and romanticized violence at that?
The last two chapters of Percy’s work are miniature novels, both titled A Space Odyssey. In one, humans discover extraterrestrial intelligences, in the other, they don’t. A play on the Arthur C. Clarke quote, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.” I won’t even attempt to unpack them, I couldn’t do that, and it would spoil them, too. I have really revealed almost nothing out of this book. It’s filled with much more strangeness, more “aha” moments and more eyebrow raising. Reading it certainly doesn’t seem to give many answers.
VI - Check One
Think back to the preliminary short quiz to determine if we were a lost self. Perhaps this can justify the strangeness of the book: he does not force you to read it. If you can answer the questions to your own satisfaction, then you don’t have to listen. If you don’t want to listen to existential musings, you don’t have to. But if you can’t answer these questions – and it seems audacious to claim otherwise – then what’s the harm with one more opinion?
One more quiz:
Percy’s work and apparent conclusion is
(a) Artistically clever but fundamentally absurd; he blows social problems wildly out of proportion; very few people really wish that tragedy would inflict their loved ones; people have fulfilling lives outside of sex, even if complicated or disappointing at times; He starts off inquisitive but spirals into delusional and grandiose statements about society as it is but never offers any hard data for it beyond death counts that don’t account for population percentages and “just look at the world as it is”. People do truly desire peace, even if they have poor or misaligned values; people are more likely to be cowards than sadists. Fundamentally the work is a trite and silly waste of time that reaches no conclusions, and just meant to spark the reader onto the road of some kind of “moderate religiousness” in the modern world through the guise of existential science fiction.
(b) A brilliant and breathtaking look into the state of the modern mind, that breaks down walls in unrelenting dedication to logic wherever it leads and disregard for social norm; it defies genre, and is equal parts social science, novel, parody, and philosophical treatise. A weird, weird, weird, book, that always makes you think and never gives easy answers, and gives the devil his due no matter what, all while being endlessly entertaining.
(CHECK ONE)
“Thou movest us to delight in praising Thee; for Thou hast formed us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee”
Percy is Catholic. He never gives a clear “answer” in his book, he merely offers different alternative viewpoints, and then uses style to show which ones he finds more convincing. Call this artistic flair or straw-manning or whatever. He presents the problem of the self in the modern age. Perhaps the solution is not his God. But – and this is his main point – TV, sex, and the atom bomb sure as Hell aren’t solutions either.
Do you read? Do you read? Are you in trouble? How did you get in trouble? If you are in trouble, have you sought help? If you did, did help come? If it did, did you accept it? Are you out of trouble? What is the character of your consciousness? Are you conscious? Do you have a self? Do you know who you are? Do you know what you are doing? Do you love? Do you know how to love? Are you loved? Do you hate? Do you read me? Come back. Repeat. Come back. Come back. Come back.
- From the “Space Odyssey” chapters. The first message received from extraterrestrial intelligences.