Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Rating:
Summary: BACK IN PRINT! WOO HOO!
Review: Allow me to shout it to the clouds: "I AM A PRODUCT OF WALKER PERCY!"

With Phil Donahue back on the air, Walker Percy's 1983 self-help book seems less dated now then it did in 1995 when I first read it. Now as then, it packs a wallop.

Those reviews calling it a satire are being a little misleading. This book actually IS a self-help book. In fact, it is probably the only self-help book out there.

While traditional self-help books are full of answers and leave little to question, this one is full of questions and almost entirely empty of answers. The idea is, that life is a journey that does not have a "little instruction book". And maybe, just maybe, there are things in our lives that distract us from even asking those important questions.

Are we lost? Not if we're enjoying the journey.

I don't want to go into any more detail. This book is something I have a difficult time talking about to other people. I feel like I have an intimate relationship with it that is difficult to describe to the casual outsider. The relationship was a little frustrating at times, but is now the kind of satisfying thing that has become a part of my life that has enriched me.

Fans of the work of Tom Robbins will know what I'm talking about when I say that this book is deadly serious and frivolously playful all at the same time.

Let's just say that with the sole exception of "What Color Is Your Parachute", this is the only self-help book out there that helped me. After reading this, "Dianetics" made me laugh until tears ran down my face.

Rating:
Summary: This can't be the same Walker Percy ...
Review: An immitigable disappointment. A half-ream of self-indulgent verbiage, an impenetrably dense syntactical fog. Never imagined Mr Percy as the unfunny comedian who gives us hours of pathological tittering at his own jokes. Labored, strained, watching-paint-dry bore-ring. Seventeen innings of scoreless baseball. Good thing I only paid a dollar plus tax for it at a mostly-socialist bookstore in the South End. It raises not the midnight-visiting ghost of a chuckle, not the thinnest waiflike spectre of a laugh.

Literally, head-pain at his unenticingly cutesy quizzes and diaffectingly labyrinthine puzzles and duller-than-dull parodies whose efficacy is blunted -- nay! rendered nuller than null and voider than void -- by being as unremittingly unendurable as that which it purports to lampoon.

On the other hand, there's his rambunctious, bawdy, cheerful, grim, earthy, holy, prophetic, gimlet-eyed LOVE IN THE RUINS -- the undisputed & indisputable best of the Percy-novels I've read.

Rating:
Summary: Aptly Titled
Review: Contrary to what other reviews stated, this IS a self-help book. In fact, it is ultimately superior to all other self-help books because Percy strikes to the core of the reason why we buy so many of these books. Percy's view of Man at his current stage is that we are all existentialist but we don't know it. At least, we can't bring ourselves to face our existentialism. We have lost any of the authentic views of the self (i.e. the God-self relationship, the philosopher, etc.) that we once had and find ourselves unable to explain, or even contemplate, the existence of a 'triadic' entity in a 'diadic' universe. We are, thus, 'Lost in the Cosmos.' You must read this book multiple times, however, because by the end of the book you will have expanded your intellect so widely that you must re-examine the beginning. In the end, we may discover why we are so screwed up, therefore requiring those '10 million self-help books.'

The only flaw may be one of ommission. Percy neglects to discuss an ancient, possibly authentic, view of the self: the citizen-self.

Rating:
Summary: The errant, prodigal Southerner facing the millenium
Review: I especially sympathised with Percy when I first read this book. I had just finished all of his novels (of which there are too few) and was at a fairly confusing time of my life. A college sophomore frustrated and confused by the surrounding societal constructs, I was fascinated at Percy's insights into the human psyche. By identifying how alone we all feel in a world full of people, he makes us feel less alone. He explains our morbid fascination with all things tragic and makes us feel okay about them. He explains prejudice without justifying it. He endorses Dixie beer. With his novels, Percy has taken the pathos of the likes of Faulkner and adapted it to contemporary times, and this book tears away at its inner workings. I have reread this book every six months for the last four years and it never loses its poignancy.

Rating:
Summary: Illustrating absurdity by being absurd!
Review: The duty of a Prophet is to draw a straight line to show how crooked we are. The duty of a satirist is to show how crooked we are by drawing an even more crooked line. Mr. Percy's line is quite crooked.

This book is billed as "the last self help book." He makes his point "sharper than a serpents tooth" in that the entire book is set of multiple-choice quizzes. But, as you suspect, the answers are stacked.

My personal favorite from page 75:

"Question: Why do so many teenagers, and younger people, turn to drugs?"

"(a) Because of peer-group pressure, failure of communication, psychological dysfunction, rebellion against parents, and decline of religious values."

"(b) Because life is difficult, boring, disappointing, and unhappy, and drugs make you feel good."

"(Check one)"

I found his perspective on suicide, and especially on being an "ex-suicide" to be both novel and fascinating. He asks the question: why not consider suicide as an option? We normally (that is, in the pre-Kevorkian world of 1983 when the book was written) exclude suicide as an option, but Percy makes the point that our depression, angst, etc. may actually have a basis in reality, and we may be justified in pulling our own plug. "Consider the only adults who are not depressed: chuckleheads, California surfers, and fundamentalist Christians . . . Would you trade your depression to become any of these?" (p.76)

By the way, for the Person of Faith who is horrified at this idea of defacing the image of God in suicide, please read (in this order) the book of Lamentations, the book of Ecclesiastes, and then the book of Job. The first two books we routinely ignore, but the last one, Job, we merely talk about and do not read. The case for life being [insert your favorite expletive here] is made in this holy trinity of Biblical books. But back to Percy!

Percy asserts that life becomes meaningful when we look at suicide as a legitimate option. He is merely reasserting the old law of oppositions, that truth is revealed in the contrast. The capacity of "not to be" makes Hamlet's "to be" all the more meaningful. If we commit suicide, we cause a ripple, annoy our creditors, but after that, nothing much else happens. We just get a change of scenery. However, if we consider suicide, then consciously elect against it, we have become empowered by our choice. We finally begin to live.

Percy closes the chapter thus:

"The difference between a non-suicide and an ex-suicide leaving the house for work, at eight o'clock on an ordinary morning:"

"The non-suicide is a little traveling suck of care, sucking care with him from the past and being sucked toward care in the future. His breath is high in his chest."

"The ex-suicide opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs. Since he has the option of being dead, he has nothing to lose by being alive. It is good to be alive. He goes to work because he doesn't have to."

You can see that Percy is a neo-existentialist, and does Kierkegaard proud. In fact, I think Percy has gotten back to the proto-existentialist in that he has not abandoned religion, which gave Kierkegaard's ideas such a zest. Reread "Fear and Trembling," and pay attention to Abraham's sacrifice.

This is an engaging book, but it has deep and complex humor, and is, in fact, a 262-page long joke. If you don't get Johnny Carson, David Lettermen, British and/or Jewish humor, don't get this book. You won't get the complex and nuance-ridden joke.

PS-I have written an addendum, which fits somewhere in the last section of the book. Maybe on the last page somewhere:

ET: "Greetings Earthling. Take me to your leader."

POTUS: " I am the leader."

ET: "We are from Bernard's star. We wish to open trade and technological exchange. We can solve your hunger, poverty, unemployment, and war problems"

POTUS: "Do you have any interns on your ship?"

Rating:
Summary: Laugh yourself sane. (More or less)
Review: This book is deeply funny, in the best way. It is not frivolous, except in the sense of parodying frivolity, nor is it flippant, nor even does it tell "jokes." Rather, it reveals (from the inside out) the bizarre, humorous truth about our own odd selves. "How can a ghost feel otherwise toward a machine than bored?" "If (the primitologist) could converse with his chimpanzee, he would have the best of both worlds: (a) beat other scientists, and (b) have someone to talk to." "I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and a-- of the universe."

This is the first book I've read from this author. I hope it won't be the last, though it will be if the cosmic gate crasher at the Donohue show turns up soon. My first intuition was, "This man has read Pascal;" then I thought "Chesterton too." That gave me a hint as to where he was coming from, but he never did lay many cards on the table. In fact, the whole book mostly consists of throwing cards up in the air and asking us to grab the right ones before they touch the ground.

In a review of one of Chesterton's books (if you like this, see Orthodoxy and Everlasting Man in particular), I said Chesterton makes us laugh ourselves sane. Percy pushes us in the same direction, with the cattle prod of humor. He's more of a pessimist than Chesterton. Sometimes he's wrong. And once in a while he slips into mere crankiness: "For every Mother Theresa, there seem to be 1,800 nutty American nuns, female Clint Eastwoods who have it in for men and are out to get the Pope." He also seems to have it in for "fundamentalists" (whom he classifies with "chuckleheads," unfairly in my perhaps minority experience) and Calvinists. (The last line he gives John Calvin in his Donahue sketch sounds very Chestertonian.) But more like Pascal, Percy speaks the language of science as well as contemporary literature. (And he pegs Carl Sagan just right.)

Think you've got life figured out? Read this book, laugh at yourself and the crazy, ingenious human race, and go wonderingly back to square one.

author, Jesus and the Religions of Man ([e-mail])

Rating:
Summary: Tells/asks it like it is . . .
Review: This is the first Walker Percy book I read. I thought his stuff was supposed to be funny. I'll try another. I suggest you give this one a miss, unless you've never read a self-help book, then perhaps this would be more entertaining than doing so.

Some of his questions recall late nights as a college student, gabbing on the sofa rather than studying.

Really, the calibre of the humour -- inane -- reminded me of the kind of spam I used to get and that now gets deleted unread.

Skip it. Any reputation he has as a humourist can't be founded on this effort.

Instead, read Henry Miller's The Cosmological Eye. Then, sit on a sofa with a college student 'til 3 a.m.

Rating:
Summary: all the prodding questions you never wanted to face
Review: Walker Percy has written a book that never really answers any of your questions but somehow leaves you feeling as if you have a broader understanding of what it means to be human. He is witty, sarcastic, entertaining and painfully honest. This is a wonderful book that should be read by anyone wishing to understand the human condition. I'm not even sure how to describe it. Just get it and you'll know what I mean. I had to read it for a culture and values class about 10 years ago and have gone thru 5 coppies from lending them out and never getting them back. :)

Rating:
Summary: excellent book
Review: Walker Percy is probably the best twentieth centruy writer I know. He really makes me think and Laugh at the same time. A very intelleigent look at human behavior. If it has been written 20 years later i'd probably would have talked about our current(mine as well) obsession with the internet.

Rating:
Summary: Percy asks the best questions!
Review: Walker Percy unleashes a breathtakingly challenging set of questions upon the reader. He wonders why we can feel terrible and abstracted one moment, but wonderful and alive after surviving a bullet wound. He asks whether we actually feel happy to hear that our next door neighbor has had a great good fortune or whether we merely feign happiness. Why wouldn't we be genuinely happy for our neighbor? Is it possible something might be wrong with us?

After proving a variety of points through asking his difficult questions, Percy goes on make a serious attempt to remedy the fact that we know far more about the orbit of the planets than we do about ourselves. Some of the concepts he originates in "Lost in the Cosmos" should be studied by mental health professionals everywhere. What he is attempting in this book is nothing less than to uncover the mystery of ourselves and why it can be so hard to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.