Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy

The Self since the time of Descartes has been stranded, split off from everything else in the Cosmos, a mind which professes to understand bodies and galaxies but is by the very act of understanding marooned in the Cosmos, with which it has no connection. It therefore needs to exercise every option in order to reassure itself that it is not a ghost but its rather a self among other selves. One such option is a sexual encounter. Another is war. The pleasure of a sexual encounter derives not only from physical gratification but also from the demonstration to oneself that, despite one's own ghostliness, one is, for the moment at least, a sexual being. Amazing! Indeed, the most amazing of all the creatures of the Cosmos: a ghost with an erection!

What do we really know about ourselves? This is a fundamental question of philosophy, I suppose, but as Walker Percy shows in Lost in the Cosmos, it's also a fundamental question of pop psychology. The whole book takes the form of a pair of "quizzes" that allow you to select the belief closest to your own--about the self, about religion, about sex, etc.--with the promise that the results will illuminate something about your life. We've moved on from this kind of book since Percy wrote it, but you still see traces of it everywhere, in Buzzfeed quizzes and horoscopes and Meyers-Briggs types. If Lost in the Cosmos has something resembling a thesis, it's this: despite years of scientific advancement that has transformed our understanding of "the Cosmos," we really know very little about our own nature.

How much of this book is serious, and how much is tongue-in-cheek? The quiz format lets Percy have it both ways--he doesn't have to make any genuine claims about the self or human nature, ones which might expose a kind of amateurishness or oversimplification that often seems to be lurking here. Are these "dyadic" and "triadic" diagrams supposed to mean something, or are they just a joke, meant to resemble the kind of bullshit that happens when you try to diagram the undiagrammable? But the method also enforces his contention that we actually know very little, the author himself included. And though the parody lacks some bite in 2026, it can be very funny, as Percy spins little Percyesque stories about priests and football players and stuff like that. I can't say that I ended up understanding myself or anything any better after reading it. I can't even say I understood the book itself. But it was certainly a gas.