Read Online Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Walker Percy
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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 )
(10) The Bored Self:
Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored
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:
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 )
(10) The Bored Self:
Why the Self is the only Object in the Cosmos which Gets Bored
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:
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