Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book QUOTES

21 " ...the self can be as desperately stranded in the transcendence of theory as in the immanence of consumption. "

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

22 " The self has no sign of itself... For me, certain signifiers fit you, and not others. For me, all signifiers fit me, one as well as another. I am rascal, hero, craven, brave, treacherous, loyal, at once the secret hero and asshole of the Cosmos. "

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

23 " the origin of consciousness is the initiation of the sign-user into the world of signs by a sign-giver. "

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

24 " My own conviction is that semiotics provides an escape from the solipsist prison by its stress on the social origins of language--you have to point to an apple and name it for me before I know there is such a thing--and the existence of a world of apples outside ourselves. "

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

25 " The fateful law of human semiotics is this: that of all the objects in the entire Cosmos which the sign-user can apprehend through the conjoining of signifier and signified (word uttered and thing beheld), there is one which forever escapes his comprehension--and that is the sign-user himself...The self of the sign-user can never be grasped, because, once the self locates itself at the dead center of its world, there is no signified to which a signifier can be joined to make a sign. The self has no sign of itself. No signifier applies. All signifiers apply equally. "

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

26 " Thought Experiment: You are a native of New York City, you live in New York, work in New York, travel about the city with no particular emotion except a mild boredom, unease, exasperation, and dislike especially for, say, Times Square and Brooklyn, and a longing for a Connecticut farmhouse. Later you become an astronaut and wander in space for years. You land on a strange, unexplored (you think) planet. There you find a road sign with an arrow, erected by a previous astronaut in the manner of GIs in World War II: 'Brooklyn 9.6 light-years.' Explain your emotion. "

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

27 " It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by upping the ante in violence. "

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

28 " Why it is that of all the billions and billions of strange objects in the Cosmos—novas, quasars, pulsars, black holes—you are beyond doubt the strangest or Why it is possible to learn more in ten minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light-years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you’ve been stuck with yourself all your life "

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

29 " This is the perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing. "

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

30 " Because the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out. "

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

31 " Consider to what extent an “antique” is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self— "

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

32 " The lost self: With the passing of the cosmological myths and the fading of Christianity as a guarantor of identity of the self, the self becomes dislocated, Jefferson or no Jefferson, is both cut loose and imprisoned by its own freedom, yet imprisoned by a curious and paradoxical bondage like a Chinese handcuff, so that the very attempts to free itself, e.g., by ever more refined techniques for the pursuit of happiness, only tighten the bondage and distance the self ever farther from the very world is wishes to inhabit as its homeland. The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late twentieth century. Every advance in an objective understanding of the Cosmos and in its technological control further distances the self from the Cosmos precisely in the degree of the advance—so that in the end the self becomes a space-bound ghost which roams the very Cosmos it understands perfectly. "

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

33 " But if the saleslady means what she says—and since you have gone through any number of such styles in the past— then it must follow that the other articles in the past were also you and are no longer. How can that be? It could only be because some sort of consumption takes place. The nought which is you has devoured the style and been sustained for a while as a non-you until the style is emptied out by the noughting self. "

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

34 " If Darwin was right, asked Wallace, why does the Tierra del Fuegan possess a brain not discernibly different from, say, Einstein’s or Beethoven’s, which he does not need? "

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

35 " The real wonder is not that the Cosmos is now seen as wonderful but that it is not. Despite its inconceivable vastness, it is seen not as wonderful but as something that can be explained as a dyadic system. "

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

36 " Note some odd things about the self’s world. One is that it is not the same as the Cosmos-environment. The planet Venus may be a sign in the self’s world as the evening star or the morning star, but the galaxy M31 may not be present at all. Another oddity is that the self’s world contains things which have no counterpart in the Cosmos, such as centaurs, Big Foot, détente, World War I (which is past), World War III (which may not occur). Yet another odd thing is that the word apple which you utter is part of my world but it is not a singular thing like an individual apple. It is in fact understandable only insofar as it conforms to a rule for uttering apples. But the oddest thing of all is your status in my world. You—Betty, Dick—are like other items in my world—cats, dogs, and apples. But you have a unique property. You are also co-namer, co-discoverer, co-sustainer of my world—whether you are Kafka whom I read or Betty who reads this. Without you—Franz, Betty—I would have no world. "

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

37 " Francis Crick, co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, believes that DNA could only have arrived from space, sent in the form of bacteria from more advanced civilizations. "

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

38 " Neo-Darwinian theory has trouble accounting for the strange, sudden, and belated appearance of man, the conscious self which speaks, lies, deceives itself, and also tells the truth. "

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

39 " The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology. "

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

40 " A variant of the amnesic-plot device is the inadvertent return of the amnesiac to home territory, where he is welcomed by a lovely woman, unknown to him, who is evidently his wife. The crucial scene is his being led off to bed. A non-amnesic equivalent is a twin or look-alike who is mistaken for someone else—by a beautiful woman. Invariably she finds him not merely oddly different but somehow better, more attractive, than the original. After a love scene, she looks at him wide-eyed and smiling (you were never like this before!). This version demonstrates that the source of pleasure for the moviegoer is not the amnesia but the certified and risk-free license to leave the old self behind and enter upon a new life, whether by amnesia or mistaken identity. "

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