Walker Percy - The Message in the Bottle - How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

SUPPOSE A MAN IS a castaway on an island. He is, moreover, a special sort of castaway. He has lost his memory in the shipwreck and has no recollection of where he came from or who he is. All he knows is that one day he finds himself cast up on the beach. But it is a pleasant place and he soon discovers that the island is inhabited. Indeed it turns out that the islanders have a remarkable culture with highly developed social institutions, a good university, first-class science, a flourishing industry and art. The castaway is warmly received. Being a resourceful fellow, he makes the best of the situation, gets a job, builds a house, takes a wife, raises a family, goes to night school, and enjoys the local arts of cinema, music, and literature. He becomes, as the phrase goes, a useful member of the community.

The castaway, who by now is quite well educated and curious about the world, forms the habit of taking a walk on the beach early in the morning. Here he regularly comes upon bottles which have been washed up by the waves. The bottles are tightly corked and each one contains a single piece of paper with a single sentence written on it.

The messages are very diverse in form and subject matter. Naturally he is interested, at first idly, then acutely — when it turns out that some of the messages convey important information. Being an alert, conscientious, and well-informed man who is interested in the advance of science and the arts, and a responsible citizen who has a stake in the welfare of his island society, he is anxious to evaluate the messages properly and so take advantage of the information they convey. The bottles arrive by the thousands and he and his fellow islanders — by now he has told them of the messages and they share his interest — are faced with two questions. One is, Where are the bottles coming from? — a question which does not here concern us; the other is, How shall we go about sorting out the messages? which are important and which are not? which are more important and which less? Some of the messages are obviously trivial or nonsensical. Others are false. Still others state facts and draw conclusions which appear to be significant.

Here are some of the messages, chosen at random:

Lead melts at 330 degrees.

2 +2 = 4.

Chicago, a city, is on Lake Michigan.

Chicago is on the Hudson River or Chicago is not on the Hudson River.*

At 2 p.m., January 4, 1902, at the residence of Manuel Gómez in Matanzas, Cuba, a leaf fell from the banyan tree.

The British are coming.

The market for eggs in Bora Bora [a neighboring island] is very good.

If water John brick is.

Jane will arrive tomorrow.

The pressure of a gas is a function of heat and volume.

Acute myelogenous leukemia may be cured by parenteral administration

of metallic beryllium.

In 1943 the Russians murdered 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest.

A war party is approaching from Bora Bora.

It is possible to predict a supernova in the constellation Ophiuchus next month by using the following technique—

The Atman (Self) is the Brahman.

The dream symbol, house with a balcony, usually stands for a woman.

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean.

Truth is beauty.

Being comprises essence and existence.

As the castaway sets about sorting out these messages, he would, if he followed conventional logical practice, separate them into two large groups. There are those sentences which appear to state empirical facts which can only be arrived at by observation. Such are the sentences

Chicago is on Lake Michigan.

Lead melts at 330 degrees.

Then there are those sentences which seem to refer to a state of affairs implicit in the very nature of reality (or some would say in the very structure of consciousness). Certainly they do not seem to depend on a particular observation. Such are the sentences

Chicago is on the Hudson River or Chicago is not on the Hudson River.

2 + 2 = 4.

These two types of sentences are usually called synthetic and analytic.

For the time being I will pass over the positivist division between sense and nonsense, a criterion which would accept the sentence about the melting point of lead because it can be tested experimentally but would reject the sentences about the dream symbol and the metaphysical and poetic sentences because they cannot be tested. I will also say nothing for the moment about another possible division, that between those synthetic sentences which state repeatable events, like the melting of lead, and those which state nonrepeatable historical events, like the murder of the Polish officers.

It is possible, however, to sort out the messages in an entirely different way. To the islander indeed it must seem that this second way is far more sensible — and far more radical — than the former. The sentences appear to him to fall naturally into two quite different groups.

There are those sentences which are the result of a very special kind of human activity, an activity which the castaway, an ordinary fellow, attributes alike to scientists, scholars, poets, and philosophers. Different as these men are, they are alike in their withdrawal from the ordinary affairs of the island, the trading, farming, manufacturing, playing, gossiping, loving — in order to discover underlying constancies amid the flux of phenomena, in order to take exact measurements, in order to make precise inductions and deductions, in order to arrange words or sounds or colors to express universal human experience. (This extraordinary activity is first known to have appeared in the world more or less simultaneously in Greece, India, and China around 600 B.C., a time which Jaspers calls the axial period in world history.)

In this very large group, which the islander might well call “science” in the broadest sense of knowing, the sense of the German word Wissenschaft, the islander would put both synthetic and analytic sentences, not only those accepted by positive scientists, but the psychoanalytic sentence, the metaphysical sentence, and the lines of poetry. (He might even include paintings as being, in a sense, sentences.) If the physicist protests at finding himself in the company of psychoanalysts, poets, Vedantists, and Scholastics, the islander will reply that he is not saying that all the sentences are true but that their writers appear to him to be engaged in the same sort of activity as the physicist, namely, withdrawal from the ordinary affairs of life to university, laboratory, studio, mountain eyrie, where they write sentences to which other men assent (or refuse assent), saying, Yes, this is indeed how things are. In some sense or other, the sentences can be verified by the readers even if not testable experimentally — as when the psychiatric patient hears his analyst explain a dream symbol and suddenly realizes that this is indeed what his own dream symbol meant.

In the second group the islander would place those sentences which are significant precisely in so far as the reader is caught up in the affairs and in the life of the island and in so far as he has not withdrawn into laboratory or seminar room. Such are the sentences