Walker Percy - Lost in the Cosmos

Question (I): Which of the two, the actors or the townspeople, are the more real, that is, perceive themselves as more nearly what they are?

(a) The townspeople because they have no illusions about themselves, their humdrum lives and workaday selves, whereas the actors not only live in a tinsel world but are themselves forever playing roles, are always “on” even when they walk into the town drugstore.

(b) The actors, particularly the actress who, by very reason of her finding herself in a real place among real people and removed from the fakery of Hollywood, is able for once in her life to become herself, her true best self.

(c) Neither town folk nor actors, because both are equally displaced, equally deprived of themselves, though in different ways. The town folk are deprived because, though they live in a “real” town, through an optical illusion they perceive the actors to be more splendidly real than they themselves and perceive the actors’ lives to be both more glamorous and more of a piece (to judge from the films) than their own, which seem somewhat dim and tentative by comparison. Through a different sort of optical illusion, the actors are able for a while to take on the very reality imputed to them by the town folk, wear it like a costume and with the greatest of ease because they’ve been doing nothing else most of their lives. Thus, they cloak the nought and nakedness of their selves, which are perhaps no different in kind from anyone else’s but perhaps more acutely felt.

Note that the felt “reality” of the actors in the town is as brief as any other performance. After six weeks on location, even the gracious actress said she “couldn’t wait to get out of the boonies.” For their part, too, the town folk might get sick and tired of the antics of, say, Mel Brooks.

Though both actors and town folk have reached for what they perceived to be a heightened reality, it, reality itself, has somehow fallen between them, like a dropped ball.

Question (II): Test your own index of misplacement.

(1) Imagine meeting Robert Redford under the most ordinary circumstances: you’re a bank teller and he comes in to cash a check. He is very nice, almost preternaturally nice. You perceive that Redford’s self has, perhaps by virtue of his film image, a higher or at least a different reality from your own.

(2) Imagine that you are a movie star finding yourself in a small town, you with all the well-known self-problems of movie stars — What if these people recognize me and hassle me, about autographs? What if they don’t recognize me? — and all the anxiety caused by three failed films, dearth of good scripts, unsympathetic directors, producers, and moneymen. Now imagine you as such a movie star watching the locals at work and play; you envy the A & P manager perched in the manager’s box keeping an eye on the checkout lines, watering the lawn of a late summer evening.

Which of the two would you rather be, the bank teller or the movie star?

(CHECK ONE)

Thought Experiment: Imagine you are walking down Madison Avenue behind Al Pacino, whom you have seen frequently in the movies but never in the flesh. He is shorter than you thought. His raincoat is thrown over his shoulder. Hands in pockets, he stops to look in the window of Abercrombie & Fitch. His face takes on a characteristic expression, jaws clenched, eyes dark and luminous, like young Corleone in The Godfather. The sight of Pacino in the flesh acting like Pacino on the screen gives you a peculiar pleasure. Then you become aware that though Pacino is looking at the articles in the window display, he is also checking his own reflection in the glass. This, too, gives you pleasure, though of a different sort. Explain the difference. (Hint: The esthetic pleasure of seeing an instance of a symbol, Pacino in the flesh at Abercrombie’s, measure up and conform to the symbol itself, Pacino on the screen, and the different pleasure of seeing the instance, Pacino, rescued from the symbol and restored to human creatureliness, the self in all its vagary, individuality, and folly. The first case: Ah, there is Pacino acting just like Corleone! The second case: Ah, there is Pacino acting just like me!)

A RECENT SURVEY in a large city reported that 95 percent of all video tapes purchased for home consumption were Insatiable, a pornographic film starring Marilyn Chambers.

Of all sexual encounters on soap opera, only 6 percent occur between husband and wife.

In some cities of the United States, which now has the highest divorce rate in the world, the incidence of divorce now approaches 60 percent of married couples.

A recent survey showed that the frequency of sexual intercourse in married couples declined 90 percent after three years of marriage.

On a talk show a female sexologist reported that a favorite fantasy of American women, second only to oral sex, was having sex with two strange men at once.

According to the president of the North American Swing Club Association, only 3 percent of married couples who are swingers get divorces, as compared with over 50 percent of non-swinging couples.

In large American cities, lunch-break liaisons between business men and women have become commonplace.

Sexual activity and pregnancy in teenagers have increased dramatically in the last twenty years, in both those who have received sex education in schools and those who have not. In some cities, more babies are born to single women than to married women.

A radio psychotherapist reported that nowadays many young people who disdain marriage, preferring “relationships” and “commitments,” speak of entering into simultaneous relationships with a second or third person as a growth experience.

In San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, to the outrage of local middle-class residents, homosexuals cruise and upon encountering a sexual prospect, always a stranger, exchange a word or a sign and disappear into the bushes. In a series of interviews, Buena Vista homosexuals admitted to sexual encounters with an average of more than 500 strangers.

A survey by a popular magazine reported that the incidence of homosexuality in the United States had surpassed that of the Weimar Republic and is approaching that of England.

Question: Do Americans, as well as other Westerners, prefer sexual variety, both heterosexual and homosexual, because

(a) The sexual revolution has occurred, which is nothing else but the overthrow of the unnatural repressions and taboos of 1,900 years of Christianity and the exploration of the free and healthy practices of a sexually liberated society.

(b) Humans are biologically as promiscuous as chimpanzees. It is only the cultural constraints of society, probably imposed by the economic necessities of an agricultural society, which required a monogamous union and children as a reliable labor source.

(c) No, man is by nature monogamous, as ethnologists have demonstrated in most cultures. It is Western society which is disintegrating, to a degree remarkably similar to the decline of the Roman Empire in the fifth century, when similar practices were reported.

(d) No, Western man is promiscuous because promiscuous sexuality is the obverse or flip side of Christianity and is in fact specified by Christianity as its opposite. Thus, pornography is something new in the world, having no parallel in ancient, so-called pagan cultures. Accordingly, there is little if any difference between present-day promiscuity and that of, say, the Victorian era. The so-called sexual revolution is nothing but the legitimizing of the secret behavior of the Victorians and its extension to women.