Walker Percy’s The Loss of the Creature is an exploration of the ways in which humans have lost their ability to have unique experiences due to the systems that plague our modern society. Percy asserts that we live in a culture in which the vast majority are consumers, with countless people lacking any individuality.
Percy explores this issue through the lens of multiple common occurrences, such as people visiting the Grand Canyon and people going to a festival.
He calls into question our basic human ability to experience life to its fullest, going into depth about how we are held back by the systems created before us that erase our ability to hold ownership over any individual thoughts and opinions without comparing or contrasting it with what came before and what will come after.
Essentially, by nobody being able to live in the present, nobody can truly live at all. Through his examination of the inherent flaw of humans regarding our inability to truly live, Percy states that “the term of the sightseer’s satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the preformed symbolic complex.”
I believe this passage represents the deeper themes of the essay. We as humans lack the ability to truly own our own experiences. We are instead bound by the experiences that came before us and are yet to come.
We subconsciously view the world through a blurred lens, through eyes that are corrupted by the very systems that run our society. Until we can reclaim our individuality, we are doomed to an endless cycle of living our lives in a way not chosen by us but dictated by society itself.
I believe the most interesting concept to take from this essay is the way in which it explores how humans experience the world around them and how it is affected and controlled by our cultures and systems.
I believe myself to be someone who lives and experiences life on a deeper level, examining the world around me more than just on a surface level. But I too fall prey to the problems presented in the writing. Am I truly a free man whose life is dictated by my own free will and choice, or am I just a product of the world around me with no control over my destiny and how I live it?
I believe it to be a bit of both, as I believe in one’s ability to shape their lives, but I would be amiss to not factor in the countless influences our society has on me and the ways it turns me into yet another consumer. It is an interesting concept to ponder, and I hope to not be yet another layman but an expert throughout my life.
