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Memories insert themselves into the present in strange, unpredictable ways—especially memories from cross-country bike trips. I’ll be chopping onions, rebuking myself because my knife skills are so poor, and suddenly an image from one of my trips will flash through my mind. I’m sitting in a bar somewhere in Nebraska, guzzling orange juice, because they didn’t serve food. I’m riding by a dramatic rocky formation jutting out of the land off the road near Dillon, Montana, and having a strange feeling about it, thinking, this must have a story in it. Or--was it in Georgia?-- a lonely road winding through miles and miles of a timber harvest—the far-off, but ubiquitous sound of equipment, invisible beyond the trees. I don’t know what it is that triggers these memories. Most of them (except, maybe Beaverhead Rock, near Dillon) were not photogenic. I took a lot of pictures during these trips, but those weren’t the experiences that stayed with me. I like that I don’t need to conjure these experiences up.
Walker Percy published an essay in 1954 called “The Loss of The Creature.” He talks about the ways we build walls between ourselves and the concrete world we live in. He talks about The Grand Canyon. The first European to witness the Grand Canyon was García López de Cárdenas. He experienced it whole in all its grandeur, with thorns, sweat, and a light that shifted over hours and days. Percy’s word for The Grand Canyon that Cárdenas experienced is the “creature,” the raw, the original, the actual, the thing itself.
Then other Europeans followed, hearing stories, hoping to see what Cárdenas saw. Eventually a park was formed with scenic view pullouts. The tourist is thrilled to recognize the same view as the postcard, stops the car, snaps the picture, and moves on. “The highest point, the term of the sightseer’s satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the criterion of the performed symbolic complex,” Percy writes.
Walker Percy’s word for the “performed symbolic complex” is “package.” The “package” is everything that intervenes between the thing itself and the real. Percy has several ideas about how to unwrap that package, most of them awful. You could get stuck in a storm in the Grand Canyon, left alone, and barely survive, for example. But I think “the package” is always with us. Just reading about “the creature” turns it into a package. Ask, “Is this it? Is this the real thing?—and poof! It’s gone!
In the second section of Percy’s essay, there’s a thesis statement this is also my favorite two sentences in the English language—not because of what they say—at least not entirely— but because of how they say it.
“A young Falkland Islander walking along a beach and spying a dead dogfish and going to work on it with his jackknife has, in a fashion wholly unprovided in modern educational theory, a great advantage over the Scarsdale high-school pupil who finds the dogfish on his laboratory desk. Similarly, the citizen of Huxley’s Brave New World who stumbles across a volume of Shakespeare in some vine-grown ruins and squats on a potsherd to read it is in a fairer way of getting at a sonnet than the Harvard sophomore taking English Poetry II.”
These sentences have been with me for decades. I think I first read this essay thirty years ago. I’ve always thought of myself as more like the jackknife boy than the laboratory student. When I taught high school English, I tried to recreate that idyllic experience with projects that would allow my students to stumble upon the objectives as if by accident. Sometimes it worked. Often it didn’t. I only lasted five years.
But it’s not just the content that makes these sentences so attractive to me. There’s something marvelous about how they’re put together, like a piece of classical architecture—like the Parthenon, but not the contemporary pictures of the grey ruins—like the Parthenon of the imagination, how it might have looked in ancient times, gleaming and bright.
I’m looking at the first long, breathless noun phrase, and it’s like I’m hovering over the Falkland Islander: “walking,” then “spying,” a dead dogfish, then that wonderfully suggestive “going to work on it!” But then, suddenly, after the passive main verb, the sentence turns mock-pedantic, “has, in a fashion wholly unprovided in modern educational theory.” Everything about the first half of the sentence is exciting: the verbs, the nouns, the rhythm. Everything about the second half of the sentence is dull. The Falkland Islander gets three active verbs. The poor Scarsdale student gets just one (“find.”)
The Harvard sophomore word to use here is “embody.” The sentence “embodies” the action of the Falkland Islander, just as it “embodies” the passivity of the sophomore. But do you really need to know that? It’s not as if you’re deciphering a code. It’s just that the sentence is creating an experience that pulses and shifts as you travel through it.
If, like me, you’re groping for examples of human goodness, add this to your list: Human beings can create experiences with language. A faculty that must have begun as grunts and moans, evolved to the point that listening or reading is an experience in and of itself, with subtle fluctuations of meaning, rhythm, and sound.
The parallelism is so solid, balanced between their central verbs. Person A has an advantage over Person B. Person C is in a fairer way of getting something than Person D. These comparisons are “similar.” That’s Percy’s thesis statement stripped of all the spectacle. But housed within that structure, four interesting vignettes share their experiences, beat their chests and brag, maybe even wrestle for the prize of “better.”
I’m not much of a wine drinker, but I feel the same awe in the presence of a connoisseur. They talk about “notes” of blackberry and cocoa. Maybe I can recognize it if I try, but most of the time the best I can do is marvel at the fact that someone else can. (The easy response is to mock them with the emperor-has-no-clothes story, but if that’s just a defense mechanism—and if that is your default position on everything, where’s the joy in life?) The gift of taste, developed as a defense against toxins, evolved into something so delicate, so refined, that some of us can suss out threads of molecules crossing over nerves in the tongue and mouth. We can recognize them, and we can give them names. When we’re not dropping bombs on each other, we human beings are pretty amazing!