Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book
Percy, Walker
LOST IN THE COSMOS: THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK Walker Percy/Farrar, Straus and Giroux/$14.95 Mark Royden Winchell One of the essays in Bill Buckley's A Hymnal tells of the embarrassment Buckley felt...
...Masquerading as a pop-culture parody, this grab-bag of philosophical meditation, fabulistic narrative, and social commentary addresses a problem cosmological in the ancient sense of the term-the need to understand the cosmos and one's place in it...
...Deriving some small consolation from the fact that no one he knew watched daytime television, Buckley prepared-a couple of weeks later-to meet a distinguished novelist and philosopher whom he regards as his hero...
...Although Percy's adherence to Catholicism has always seemed tenuous, he is an honest seeker with the will to believe...
...By giving us a choice of scenarios (check one), the author avoids a definitive endorsement of either scientific utopianism or spartan piety...
...gene pool and the future quality of life will be improved by the contribution of Dr...
...When the crew of that flight returns home, 400 earth years have passed, and most of the human race has been decimated by nuclear war...
...In the space odyssey at the end of Lost in the Cosmos, he does again what he did in his 1971 novel Love in the Ruins-he extrapolates an imagined future as a way of commenting on the dilemmas of the present (interestingly enough, a growing number of post-Vatican II Catholic fictions are being written as futuristic fables...
...An example of this is "The Last Donahue Show," a colloquium featuring a cruising homosexual, an adulterous businessman, a pregnant fourteen-year-old, and "a well-known talk-show therapist, or in media jargon: a psych jock...
...F's ejaculate...
...LOST IN THE COSMOS: THE LAST SELF-HELP BOOK Walker Percy/Farrar, Straus and Giroux/$14.95 Mark Royden Winchell One of the essays in Bill Buckley's A Hymnal tells of the embarrassment Buckley felt when he was cajoled into playing the harpsichord on the "Dinah Shore Show" (he was promoting a book at the time...
...Percy then asks us whether "the U.S...
...However, Abbot Liebowitz-who as a Jewish convert to Catholicism represents two ancient traditions- seems to embody the more heroic alternative...
...In one memorable vignette, a Nobel laureate lies in his Washington hotel room and masturbates into a bottle while watching a closed-circuit screening of Behind the Green Door...
...Among the American survivors are an astronomer named Aristarchus Jones and a Benedictine abbot named Liebowitz...
...Although it makes no policy recommendations (e.g., nuclear freeze), Lost in the Cosmos is less than kind in its treatment of the military-scientific-industrial complex...
...His problem is that he knows too much of both Christianity and science to rest comfortably in simplistic formulations of either...
...Lost in the Cosmos concludes with the tale of a round-trip space flight between Earth and a planet erroneously thought to contain intelligent life...
...Notes Percy: "There are only these contraindications: expense, crime, illness, death...
...His book on William Buckley will appear next spring...
...Finally, the scientist prepares to mail his bottle of sperm to an insemination laboratory in California...
...The quirky eclecticism which makes Walker Percy Bill Buckley's hero and an expert-on daytime TV is evident in his latest work, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book...
...If Eliot was correct in saying that Tennyson was more truly religious in his doubt than in his faith, then Walker Percy can be judged religious by the intensity of his search...
...With the fate of the Holy Father and the rest of the clergy unknown, Liebowitz decides to take seriously Christ's promise that His Church will endure until the end of the world...
...In a subsequent phone conversation, he and a general discuss a preemptive chemical warfare strike against the Russians (hearing only one side of the conversation, we are reminded of a Bob Newhart or Shelley Berman nightclub routine- itself the comedic basis for a famous scene in Dr...
...As might be inferred from the foregoing, one of the delights of this book is Percy's gift for rendering the New Age ethos in all its strident banality...
...Just saw you on the Dinah Shore show...
...That moment came when Buckley emerged from his plane on a small airstrip east of New Orleans: "a tall lanky man in Levi's" approached, shot out his hand, and said, "I'm Walker Percy, Mr...
...To a large degree, Percy contends, Mark Royden Winchell teaches English at the University of Southern Mississippi...
...Indeed, for many Americans religion is no longer their opiate, but opiates their religion...
...I feel I know you...
...Check "yes" or "no...
...Paradoxically, what makes this task difficult is also what makes it possible-the fact that man is conscious of himself as a self...
...Nevertheless, the political Right ought not to assume that it has an ally in Percy...
...The choice facing the crew is either to go with Jones to colonize a new planet or to follow Liebowitz to the radiation-free oasis of Lost Cove, Tennessee (like Hank Williams, Jr., Percy is convinced that country folks can survive...
...The cosmos in which he is lost is one that Jerry Falwell and Carl Sagan have yet to discover...
...the malaise of our time results from the belief that such palliatives as scientism, politics, religiosity, and sex will enable us to transcend the loneliness which self-consciousness begets...
...Strangelove...
...As a case in point, the author cites a rock star's testimonial to his chauffeur: "Don't let anybody kid you-nothing, not sex, not music, not adulation, can compare with the rush of intravenous Dilaudid...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
