Walker Percy’s “The loss of the creature” is an exceedingly fascinating piece of work. Through the use of examples, Walker tries to stress the idea that any person with expectations will not be able to accept fully and learn from any experience. He reveals how most of the times people perceive in advance the result of an experience, but, in most cases, the experience falls short of our expectations. He further argues that, human beings can truly only lurch upon beautiful things and find them best when least expected. According to Percy, humans learn best to stand on their own only by the experiences life presents to them. These experiences, therefore, shape us as human beings and happen, only if we leave what he describes as the “beaten track.”
He also noted that the sudden sneak of beauty keeps us from the distractions of our everyday lives.
Walker demonstrates his points by describing several examples. Firstly, he presents an example of a family of tourists and their experience at the Grand Canyon. Here, he tries to show how most of the tourists having had preconceived information of the marvel are let down with a lackluster sight rather than the miraculous wonder they have dreamt about. The barrier between imagination and reality hinders the tourists’ view of the site directly. Walker argues that, the tourists can only see the beauty of the canyon if they drift away from the beaten track and see it from a unique perspective without precognitions.
In addition, Percy gives an example of a couple who got stuck while meandering and stumbled in a Mexican village. This couple never expected to meet the ethnologist, and upon meeting him, they decided to spend time with him, and ended up living the life of the locals. This turned out to be a better experience than their expectation. In another example, Percy explains how one student comes across a dead dogfish at the beach, and the other has a Shakespeare sonnet. Both students are uninformed of the factual experience they could go through, and the teacher might as well present the dogfish to the English student and the couplet to the biology student because they will be competent to investigate and discover more within the diverse settings, and without the surroundings and expectations.
In his article “The Loss of the Creature,” Percy made legitimate points. I agree with him, that, our expectations always fall short of our expectations. I also believe that the most beautiful of experiences are always those that are unanticipated. I believe, too, that, when we encounter any kind of experience in life, and we are forced to stand on our own, these situations shape us the most. I agree with all of Percy’s theories because I have actually had personal experiences that prove these very points.
Just like the tourists I happened to travel quite often during my high school years. Once, I had a trip to the Thompson falls. I expected to have a clear view of the fall but, on the contrary, the terrain was rugged, and the thick bushes were a hindrance to the site.
Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” demonstrates how to mold our minds through the ways of surprise, growth, and going with the flow. I can connect his views of life with my very own life experiences.
David Wallace’s “In your own words”
“In His Own Words,” is an address by David Foster Wallace to graduates of the Kenyon College in 2005. David Foster Wallace is an eccentric speaker who tries to put forward to the reader and the Kenyon graduates that in actual sense thinking is not in actuality about the aptitude to think, but somewhat about the selection of what to think about. He does not use hard vocabularies to convey his message nor bit about the bush as most leaders do. Indeed, he stresses this point by using stories about tangible experiences that typical working people pass through in their day to day life.
Wallace takes his time in dissecting each of the didactic little stories that he uses as examples to explain his points on the intricate way the mind works. He also uses old clichés like “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master". These helps the reader to decipher the information the writer is trying to convey.
Wallace tries to explain the definition of true, authentic sovereignty. That is being well-informed, and comprehending how to think. The unconventional is, the default setting, which he defines as the continuous bothering sense of having had, and lost, some never-ending thing.
Wallace brings out the surprising fact that humans tend to think in a sort of natural, basic self-centeredness way because it’s a default setting, hard-wired into the human boards at birth. However, in order to teach the human mind to think he suggests that one should choose to carry out the work of somehow adjusting or getting gratis of their natural, hard-wired default setting which is profoundly and accurately self-absorbed and to see and deduce everything in the course of this lens of self. In this way, the human way of thinking will be less arrogant and ill have little critical awareness about self and self certainties.
I found David’s writing very persuasive, well explained and quite informative. He uses actual life experiences which enabled me easily visualize and understand the comparable way most humans think and why I fail to stay alert because of the constant monologue inside my head. I loved the descriptive language he used which contained simple adjectives but which were meticulously placed such that the final product was just flowing from the first to the last page.
Just like in his example, I have always found myself whenever am stuck in traffic or in a long queue at the cafeteria I easily fall into my natural default settings and only focus on myself that is; my ravenousness, my weariness, and my yearning to get home, and it always seems that the world like everybody else is just on my way. However, I have learnt from David to prefer to compel myself to reflect on the likelihood that everyone else in the cafeteria is just as jaded and aggravated as I am and that a few of these inhabitants possibly have harder, more dreary and excruciating lives than I do.
In conclusion, it is safe to believe that David Foster Wallace values making the right choice. He is of the belief that thinking is always alert, and not to fall in our natural default settings. He also values real education, and for him, this real education has all to do with effortless awareness; knowledge of what is so authentic and indispensable so concealed in plain view all around us and all the time.
