Walker Percy - Lost in the Cosmos

You have been invited to appear tonight on the Tom Snyder Show to promote your new book, Space and Sexuality.

Your neighbor and friend has also written a book and has been invited to appear on the Johnny Carson Show — which has a higher rating in the sweeps than Snyder. To tell the truth, his book sales exceed yours. You two do not disagree in your understanding of the Cosmos and in your assessment of man’s danger to himself. Yet your solutions are different. He believes that world peace can be achieved only by uniting the Western tradition of science and technology and the Eastern tradition of self-transcendence, especially Zen and Tibetan Buddhism.

In his book, Space and Satori, a version of the British starship Daedalus, powered by nuclear fusion, is proposed, the crew to be commanded by an experienced astronaut but with a spiritual leader on board, the noted Tibetan mystic Ti Chen.

Tonight, your neighbor, Dr. L___, and Ti will promote their book, Space and Satori, on the Carson Show. Both of you know that it is more desirable to be on the Carson Show than on the Tom Snyder Show.

As you make your morning trip to the paper-tube, you meet not Dr. L___ but his wife, who has bad news. She has reached her paper-tube first and is holding aloft the L.A. Times. There on the front page is an article exposing a sexual scandal at the Ti Chen Institute at La Jolla. Described by a disaffected disciple as an orgy, an incident is described in which Ti Chen is alleged to have engaged in a debauch with some of his young male disciples, in the course of which your neighbor, Dr. L____, appeared unexpectedly, flew into a jealous rage, and assaulted Ti Chen with a broken bottle. Everyone at the institute, in various states of undress, was arrested by the La Jolla police.

“Can you believe such crap!” cries your neighbor’s wife, in a tearful rage, and slaps the L.A. Times. “I mean, my God, this you would expect from the National Enquirer. The same tissue of lies. I’m going to sue the bastards. Wouldn’t you?”

You nod gravely and solicitously. This is bad news, indeed. This could mean the end of Dr. L__'s career at NASA, the end of his “scientific Buddhism.” His wife says: “Would you believe Carson canceled him tonight?”

You shake your head, one arm around Dr. L__'s wife, patting her solicitously.

You grow thoughtful. Taken altogether, this is

(a) Unrelievedly bad news.

(b) Putatively bad news.

(CHECK ONE)

(8) You are one of two distinguished Southern writers in residence at Yaddo and living in neighboring cottages. You are both men of letters, noted for your poetry, fiction, and criticism. For years, even though you both live in Massachusetts, you have both attacked the crass, materialistic, money-grubbing society of the North and defended the traditional, agrarian, Christian values of the South, with its strong sense of place, family, and roots.

After a day of work, Writer A meets Writer B, as is their wont, on a pleasant woodland path to the dining room. The excited hostess of Yaddo breaks the rule of silence and accosts them in the woods. She has news that won’t keep. Dan Rather has just announced it on the six o’clock news: Writer B has just won the Nobel Prize for literature!

Writer A embraces Writer B warmly. B shrugs: We both know what we think of the Nobel, etc. Yet B looks pleased. Whatever they think of the Nobel — e.g., people like John Steinbeck and Pearl Buck getting it, Joyce not getting it — it comes to over $200,000. Writer B looks pleased. Writer A horses around a bit, dares B to do a Sartre and turn it down, but still and all shows his pleasure: I’m so damned pleased for you.

If you are A, are you

(a) Unrelievedly pleased.

(b) Putatively pleased.

(CHECK ONE)

THE WORD BOREDOM did not enter the language until the eighteenth century. No one knows its etymology. One guess is that bore may derive from the French verb bourrer, to stuff.

Question: Why was there no such word before the eighteenth century?

(a) Was it because people were not bored before the eighteenth century? (But wasn’t Caligula bored?)

(b) Was it because people were bored but didn’t have a word for it?

(c) Was it because people were too busy trying to stay alive to get bored? (But what about the idle English royalty and noblemen?)

(d) Is it because there is a special sense in which for the past two or three hundred years the self has perceived itself as a leftover which cannot be accounted for by its own objective view of the world and that in spite of an ever heightened self-consciousness, increased leisure, ever more access to cultural and recreational facilities, ever more instruction on self-help, self-growth, self-enrichment, the self feels ever more imprisoned in itself — no, worse than imprisoned because a prisoner at least knows he is imprisoned and sets store by the freedom awaiting him and the world to be open, when in fact the self is not and it is not — a state of affairs which has to be called something besides imprisonment — e.g., boredom. Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself.

(e) Is it because of a loss of sovereignty in which the self yields up plenary claims to every sector of the world to the respective experts and claimants of these sectors, and that such a surrender leads to an impoverishment which must be called by some other name, e.g., boredom?

(f) Is it because the self first had the means of understanding itself through myth, albeit incorrectly, later understood itself through religion as a creature of God, and now has the means of understanding the Cosmos through positive science but not itself because the self cannot be grasped by positive science, and that therefore the self can perceive itself only as a ghost in a machine? How else can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?

(CHECK ONE OR MORE)

Question: Why is it no other species but man gets bored? Under the circumstances in which a man gets bored, a dog goes to sleep.

Thought Experiment: Imagine that you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look — it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on the serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions — good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide — be a bore?

Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.

Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?

Explain.

THE SUICIDE RATE among persons under twenty-five has risen dramatically in the last twenty years.

A recent survey disclosed that the symptom of depression outnumbered all other medical symptoms put together.

On a daytime radio psychotherapy talk show, 80 percent of all women calling in reported that they were depressed.