Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy

Author:Walker Percy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Essays, Humor, Semiotics
ISBN: 9780312253998
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1983-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

(14) The Orbiting Self:

Reentry Problems of the Transcending Self, or Why it is that Artists and Writers, Some Technologists, and indeed Most People have so much Trouble Living in the Ordinary World

IN THE AGE OF science, scientists are the princes of the age. Artists are not. So that even though both scientists and artists achieve transcendence over the ordinary world in their science and art, only the scientist is sustained in his transcendence by the exaltation of the triumphant spirit of science and by the community of scientists.

It is perhaps no accident that at the high tide of physics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the great revolutionary physicists—e.g., Faraday, Maxwell, Bohr, Einstein—were also men of remarkable integrity and exultant wholeness of character, of generosity and benignity. Compare the lives and characters of the comparably great in literature at the same time: Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Kafka, Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway.

With the disappearance of the old cosmological myths and the decline of Judaeo-Christianity and the rise of the autonomous self, science and art, one the study of secondary causes, the other the ornamental handmaiden of rite and religion, were seized upon and elevated to royal highroads of transcendence in their own right. Such transcendence was available not only to the scientists and artists themselves but to a community of fellow scientists and students, and to the readers and listeners and viewers to whom the “statements” of art, music, and literature were addressed.

But what is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? What did Faulkner do after writing the last sentence of Light in August? Get drunk for a week. What did Dostoevsky do after finishing The Idiot? Spend three days and nights at the roulette table. What does the reader do after finishing either book? How long does his exaltation last?

The only exception to this psychic law of gravity seems to be not merely the great physicists at the high tide of modern physics but any scientist absorbed in his science when the exaltation of science sustains one in a more or less permanent orbit of transcendence—or perhaps the rare Schubert who even during meals wrote lieder on the tablecloth or the Picasso in a restaurant who instead of eating bread molded it into statuettes.

But the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by artists and writers. They, especially the latter, seem subject more than most people to estrangement from the society around them, to neurosis, psychosis, alcoholism, drug addiction, epilepsy, florid sexual behavior, solitariness, depression, violence, and suicide.

Question: Is this the case because

(a) Genius is close to madness (Plato)?

(b) Modern society, especially American, is crass, materialistic, money-grubbing, and status-seeking, a nation of Yahoos and Babbitts, and the artist who is in pursuit of truth and beauty is entitled to be alienated (Gauguin, Flaubert, Lewis, et al.

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