Walker Percy

Walker Percy's 1975 book, "What One Has To Do With The Other" included many essays that dealt with the relationships between language and understanding or belief, The Loss of the Creature was one of these essays. In this essay, Percy writes about the loss of title, sovereignty, the creature, and spoliation. He accomplishes this by using several short stories combined to send one main idea to the reader. The main idea that he is trying to illustrate is that as you grow and change, you lose your own vision, and your vision becomes what society wants it to be.

Another lesson Percy tries to get across to the reader is that we as a society should rediscover that which has been commercialized. One of his many examples of over- commercialization is the Grand Canyon. In Percy's opinion, this natural site has been stripped of its beauty because of postcards, posters, and television. Percy believes that the only person to truly see the Grand Canyon was Cardenas. Cardenas discovered the Grand Canyon by simply walking thru the woods and stumbling upon it. This is a prime example of a person with no preconceived notion of what he was about to see getting the experience. Percy feels that the best way to rediscover this natural site is to travel off the beaten path and see the site from a new perspective, but even then, he fears that this too will become commercialized.

Another example Percy gives is when he compares an uneducated islander to a high school student:

"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."

The islander who has no formal training in the subject of literature would not find any value in a sonnet, and the student who has probably only seen a dogfish on a lab table sees it more as a grade or test than a representative of food. The difference is the fundamental placement of the dogfish and how the islander finds it versus how the pupil finds it. When the pupil finds it, the dogfish is called "1 specimen of Sqalus acanthias" and neatly arranged in his desk. As soon as the word specimen is used the dogfish has lost its being completely, it is no longer a thing that once lived but merely a thing. This causes a radical devaluation of the individual dogfish. To recover the dogfish, the student must avoid the direct presentation of the object by the teacher as a lesson to be learned or a test to be graded. He must restore the dogfish as a being to be known and reassume the sovereignty of "knower over known" and also have an openness of the thing before it.

There are two ways that things may be restored to the person. The first being by ordeal. Simply put, something tragic happens to change the point of view the person has leading them out of everydayness and into a completely different point of view. The second being by apprenticeship to a great man. This man would have little use for equipment or jargon but would rather learn and teach with his own hands and