Message in the Bottle. How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other

by Walker Percy

In Message i n the Bottle , Walker Percy offers insights on such varied yet interconnected subjects as symbolic reasoning, the origins of mankind, Helen Keller, Semioticism, and the incredible Delta Factor. Confronting difficult philosophical questions with a novelist's eye, Percy rewards us again and again with his keen insights into the way that language possesses all of us.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Essays, Language, Writing, Linguistics, Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

About the author

Walker Percy was an American writer whose interests included philosophy and semiotics. Percy is noted for his philosophical novels set in and around New Orleans; his first, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award for Fiction.
Trained as a physician at Columbia University, Percy decided to become a writer after a bout of tuberculosis. He devoted his literary life to the exploration of "the dislocation of man in the modern age." His work displays a combination of existential questioning, Southern sensibility, and deep Catholic faith. He had a lifelong friendship with author and historian Shelby Foote and spent much of his life in Covington, Louisiana, where he died of prostate cancer in 1990.

Reviews

[Ian Mullet · Rating 5 out of 5]

despite the upchuck-inducing cover of the edition that comes up on goodreads, this is a good book, indeed a good read.

while he's more famous for his novels, i enjoy his essays more. in his novels he always strains for opportunities to wax philosophical and in his essays he finally has free reign to just go for it. "the delta factor" and "man on a train" stand out in my memory.

"the delta factor" opens with six pages of questions, mostly about the existential conundrum that we are sad when we should be happy (and vice versa), before he makes a declarative statement.

from "man on a train:"
"there is a great deal of difference between an alienated commuter riding a train and this same commuter reading a book about an alienated person riding a train.... The nonreading commuter exists in true alienation, which is unspeakable, the reading commuter rejoices in the speakability of his alienation and in the new triple alliance of himself, the alienated character, and the author. His mood is affirmatory and glad: Yes! that is how it is!"

in truth, i probably put a little too much stock in the above quote while in high school, always thinking, maybe i'd be happier if i just read MORE kafka and dostoyevsky...

for me, i think percy served better as an introduction to existentialism rather than as a full-blown exploration of it, so i'm not sure how much these essays would mean if any of my goodreads friends were to read them these days, but they sure bring back exciting intellectual memories!

of course, my favorite essay of his comes from a different collection in which he calls our hometown of covington, louisiana a "nonplace." tell me about it...

r.i.p. mr. percy! i hardly knew ye.

[Leif · Rating 4 out of 5]

I recommend reading "Lost in the Cosmos" before this one. This is a collection of essays dealing with language and what our use of symbols and signs tells us about our essential humanity. If you are not a Christian, you should keep in mind that Percy is (although NOT a fundamentalist, young-earther; in fact, he is equally critical of fundamentalists on both sides of the God question), and it informs every argument he makes. If you know that up front, it should not stop you from enjoying and learning from his writings, even if you are an atheist or some other religion. Much like O'Connor, his religion, while central to his world view, does not restrict his writing or make it feel like he is trying to convert you. He merely wants to provoke you into thought.

[booklady]

Robert Moynihan, reporting from Rome, "Inside the Vatican Magazine" Newsflash, Letter from Rome, #22: 'I studied the works of Walker Percy, the American Catholic novelist, when I was in college, at Harvard. I went to meet Percy in 1977. His most important book is a collection of philosophical essays entitled The Message in the Bottle.

The entire goal of his writing was to show how the historical events of Christian history constituted a "message" which brought life to people who were in the position of "castaways" on a desert island, waiting for a message that could help them in their plight to wash up on the beach...

And he did not write didactically, as if to say, "this is the message, here is part one, here is part two, you must believe this point, and this point, and also this other point..."

Rather, he described men and women finding the message, right in the middle of their loneliness -- all of us are shipwrecked; that is why we should be kind to one another -- and in finding the message, finding true life.'

[Cynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Percy attempts to define language, define language processing and more. I particularly enjoyed "The Delta Factor," a re-telling of language triangles work. Percy turns the commonplace communication/rhetorical triangle on its head. Perhaps Helen Keller the listener received Anne Sullivan's message of "water" and understood the subject of water as liquid. Or maybe Keller the listener heard both water and liquid as messenger/communicator with Sullivan being outside the triangle. Sullivan would then of course be the facilitator/teacher. Of course.
I understood some of what Percy says in the book with an "of course"/"oh yeah" awareness. Yet much of what he says in this book is beyond me. What I understood was powerful and worth re-reading.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting and-but dense book that reads very much like it was written—put together over a long period of time, without much regard for the way it would read all at once.

Most readers could probably just skip to Lost in the Cosmos and The Moviegoer, which share not only ideas but fragments of scenes and scenarios with the essays in this book. But Percy fans should, at a minimum, read "The Loss of the Creature," "The Message in the Bottle," and "Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism" for longer, more concrete treatments of ideas that operate, in those books, in very important and occasionally obscure ways.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is flesh grass? “Is looking like sucking: the more lookers, the less there is to see?” Can our consciousness of the corn dance escape the consciousness of our consciousness, and does this certify the experience or nullify it? To decide, check out the linguistic and cultural exploration The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy. Consider yourself adrift down your own Mississippi to the very delta of the mind, and know that “there is always that which lies around the bend.” Examine what happens when utopias don’t work, recapture a present that is too often surrendered to the past or the future, and gaze upon a literary bonfire in which “words are potent agents and the sparks are bound to fly.” Delve as deeply as you dare into the self, the other and society, and ask yourself if there is “any difference, no difference, or the greatest possible difference, between that which I privately apprehend and that which I apprehend and you validate by naming in such a way that I am justified in hoping that you ‘mean’ that very ineffable thing?”

[Ilze · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's a miracle I made it - yes, I actually READ EVERY PAGE - all the way to the end. But then, I might've known there's trouble when I realized that the first chapter consists almost in its entirety of questions ... only to discover the origin of it all, Walker Percy had read about Helen Keller's acquisition of language and this led him to ask questions. I'm not sure how many times he repeats for us how Keller suddenly realized that "water" = "water" spelt on her hand when her tutor let the liquid flow over her hand. How thrilled she was and how eager she was to learn what else the world consists of, because for the first time this liquid did not only mean "the end of thirst", it was "water" (as opposed to wine, juice, tea, etc.).

According to Elie Wiesel, God created man because He loves stories. By the same token, one of Adam's first tasks was to name the animal kingdom. Is it any wonder, then, that a large part of man's existence consists in naming things and getting a kick out of it? Why has Percy spent 300(+) pages theorizing and philosophizing about it without even coming up with an answer!? In fact, if you want to philosophize about something, please do it properly. Percy can't.

I have one quote out of the book which really meant something to me: "... poetry validates that which has already been privately apprehended but has gone unformulated for both of us ..." (the Eureka!/'This is it' feeling is traversing new territory in my conscious being, so the poet becomes the sightseer and helps us verbalize the world around us) - This (to me) is profound! Let's read (and write) more poetry if this is what it does for us. It reiterates what I read many years ago: "...The fact that human beings involve themselves in inventing something as 'impractical' as poems seems to follow from our status as sapient beings who communicate and can represent boundaries to ourselves ... Although such an account may explain pragmatic invention, it falls short of explicating impractical inventive activities like poetry writing. Why bother with such stuff?" : D.N.Perkins.

One bothers with such stuff because man is not Homo Sapiens, but Homo Symbolificus for it is by symbols (as opposed to signifiers) that man conceives of the world, to use Percy's words. The only ones that made sense - so, er, don't read the whole book just for that. It'll put you to sleep.

[Mike Bright · Rating 3 out of 5]

My rating of this book is highly suspect, because I just didn't understand much of it. The book is a collection of articles on the definition and philosophy of language. There is a fair amount of repetition between articles, which normally would be annoying. However, in this case, the third or fourth time through a complex explanation it finally started to make some tiny bit of sense.

At the core, I believe Dr. Percy is on to something - the concept of language is unique to humans and very poorly understood. As he points out, we understand grammar and linguistics. We understand how organisms respond to certain sounds. But we really don't know how to define, explain, or understand how humans symbolize ideas and objects and how we communicate those symbols between conscious minds. One of the interesting suggestions was that consciousness is a social phenomenon, not an individual attribute.

I need to give some credentials here, not to brag but to explain my reaction to the book. I have a Ph.D. in computer engineering. I have interests and some background in philosophy (Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus), anthropology (Boas, Sapir, Whorf), semiotics (Pierce), and linguistics (Chomsky, IBM researchers who influenced my Ph.D. dissertation). However, this book blew me out of the water. The vocabulary is dense. You dive right in with no definitions or explanations. The references to ideas that you need to understand ahead of time are relentless. I honestly don't know if this material is brilliant or nonsensical.

Dr. Walker is trained in psychiatry, but I don't see any specific education or practical training in philosophy, anthropology, semiotics, linguistics, etc. in his resume. A few times he does refer to himself as an outsider. As an academic, I am quite leery of people who cross discipline borders and try to instruct folks in the other discipline. But there are nuggets that ring true here - to the extent I understand them.

This was a difficult read. I regularly found myself going over a paragraph for the fifth time and still not getting it. I like a challenge, but I like challenges where I have a chance - this one was beyond me.

Best wishes to anyone who takes this book on. I hope you write a primer that explains it to the humbled likes of me.

[Gene · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book convinced me that Walker Percy is a social scientist and a philosopher, not simply a novelist whose stories I enjoy. He is steeped in training in existential philosophy, in psychology, and in language. He is also very observant. His main point to me was that the scientists who assume we are just a more advanced organism cannot simply by looking at the behavior of language as a sign/response relationship explain how we ended up talking and conveying meaning. As a Christian, he knows there is more there than what the scientists have been able to put their collective finger on. He borrows from other experts to expand his own theory of symbols relating meanings through language as social events.

It's not really an area of deep interest for me, so I got bogged down in the details and in the lingo of existential philosophy, psychology, and analysis of communication. For those who are gripped by this area of study, though, I think this would be a great book to read. Sadly, it becomes a bit repetitive because it is a collection of essays he has given. He has some really great insights, though, such as seeing the significance of humans giving things names; the discovery of the symbolic word "water" standing for the thing water for Helen Keller is brought up by him over and over again. He looks at our "need" to find names for all the things around us. I was surprised he never mentioned Adam being given this task by God.

My enthusiasm for the book waned after the first 70 pages or so, but it was still well-written and eye-opening.

[Chris DeCleene · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will have to always be one of the best books I’ll never finish. There are parts that are so simply and deeply insightful that they have fundamentally informed my own self-understanding, and there are parts that are so technical and dense that I couldn’t make anything of them at all. It’s sat untouched at the bottom of my reading/to-read stack for probably a couple years now and it’s time for it to move on to a shelf.

[Sarah Duggan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I skimmed sections because I can only handle so much linguistic theory. There are some good Percy witticisms in here, including ideas that would become the plots of his novels The Last Gentleman and Love In the Ruins. The snarky observations about the state of Catholic literature in the modern world were my favorite. If you like his novels, this is like the special features commentary track to his stories.

[Dave Courtney · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a journey
Or maybe more astutely observed, an exercise.
An exercise in philosophical, theological and theoretical thought

I admit, I likely understood less than half of what i read, but the whole was still nevertheless transformative. I am genuinely in love with his process, and I find a certain compatibility with my own ways of thinking and the questions I am interested in asking.

It's a collection of essays and some are better than others. The Delta Factor opens the collection with a bang, exposing what many of his feel this side of the grand experiment we once called the enlightenment. Why are we sad when we should be happy, and why are we happy when we should be sad. It feels so simple and so concise and even altogether familiar, and yet I have never experienced the essential facet of the existentialist concerns put so aptly and accessible. When he asks, what does a man do when he finds himself living after an age has ended and no longer able to understand himself because the old no longer makes sense and the new is not yet known, I found myself nodding. Feeling understood is important. Vital even. Percy gets it.

His answer? We need a singularity. A constant. Something trustworthy. He finds this in the theory of language. It is the subject of language that binds these essays together in a cohesive theme, and it is language that can bind all of history, and indeed belief, together in a cohesive sense of meaning and direction.

If we want to understand the essential "human" crisis, we begin with the essential observation of language. Language doesn't set man over the rest of nature- all of nature communicates after all- it does set us uniquely within it.

If we want to understand the emergence of meaning, and indeed a crisis of meaning, we look at language. The act of naming sets sign (an object announcing itself) in relationship with symbol (the act of describing an object in a way that allows it to be known). Part of this discussion notes the differentiating between the act of a scientist as one of objectively standing over the world and its signs, a necessary marker of the enlightenment, and the behavior of the scientist as a dimension of intersubjectivity- the one interpreting the symbol.

Such is the means of human existence. There isn't just the writer and the book, there is the reader. It is the dimension of the reader that engages all modes of objectivity. These things cannot be detached from one another, as he shows in turning the theoretical language triangle on its head (A Theory of Language).

We are so wrapped up in symbol making that the practice itself becomes invisible to us in the basic act of living. It is only when our symbols become challenged, when they are left unable to explain or make sense of the world, that we become aware, tempted to retreat back to a world of signs but unable to function apart from being an interpreter. We find ourselves desperate to write a story that has an ending, and thus a necessary beginning that depends on the propping up of us versus them plot structures, and yet so often this is mired in the fact that such endings carry the appearance of illusions. Thus goes the intertextuality of living, caught in the throes of a progressive, linear design but wrestling for the circulatory of meaning. Not simply to arrive somewhere, but to be transformed.

This is what we find in the act of symbolism. It is the symbols that awaken us to the potential od something more, precisely because they allow us to interpret the world.

A castaway shipwrecked on an unfamiliar island with no recollection of how he got to where he is. He discovers an unfamiliar people and becomes part of an unfamiliar society. Now this person begins to find bottles washing up on shore containing sentences. Some make obvious empirical sense, others do not. Some seem to be absent of context, others false context- Percy's parable assumes the shipwrecked man to be one moving from the old world into modernity, with the society being scientists.

With this in mind he poses some questions about the nature of knowledge and its reception. Knowledge is that which can be obtained by anyone at any time. News on the other hand cannot be obtained by anyone at any time. It requires context and a relationship between the reader, the writer and the news itself. Here then is the important point- knowledge can be confirmed or rejected, a piece of news must be heeded. The response of one encountering knowledge is to know. The response of one encountering a piece of news is "to take action appropriate to his predicament." Why? Because news matters in this way. If all it was was a piece of knowledge then all we have to do is know. News suggests information that exists in relationship to the world via that hearer, the speaker and the data. It is what leaves us, as persons, existing in this world as ones experiencing this world. The question becomes, to what point do we, living in a modernist world ruled by a society of scientists, make room for this sort of information, especially when we can't simply ignore its existence. We've built a world of knowledge, but we've become less and less capable and open to reading and acting upon the news. If language has the power to correct this trajectory, it is through the recovery of the symbol

[Rebecca Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Interesting essays on language, from a perspective inspired by C. S. Pierce.

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beginning with his National Book Award novel, The Movie Goer, which I read in 1972, I read most of Walker Percy’s novels throughout the 70s, then finally read for the first time his last novel, The Thanatos Connection, in 2014. Percy’s authorial voice is personable, calm, quietly sane, reassuring, and he approaches the issue of alienation and re-encountering one’s misplaced humanity with a subtle homeliness that is compelling and often comic. Message in the Bottle’s subtitle—“How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other”—makes the suggestive claim that he’s going to explore in this collection of essays the relation language has to the human malaise he’s charted in his novels.

I was disappointed in my first go-round with Message in the Bottle in 1980, though I never abandoned my copy of the book. I felt cheated that so much of the book had to do with either the triad or tetrad of communication/meaning, and that it had much less to do with the sense of absence and meaninglessness, and that it had even less to do with the connection between the two. And, frankly, at the time, I thought the scholarly essays on semiotics and the assaults on the contemporary schools of thought on language use/analysis were dry and almost incomprehensible.

My better appreciation of the book in this second reading is much enhanced by greater patience and my familiarity with more of the work of Susanne K. Langer and Ernst Cassirer, philosophers whose valorization of humankind’s symbol-use in language, philosophy, and art approaches Percy’s enthusiasm. In this second reading, I found it possible to observe that, while the subject-matter ratios in these essays were no different than formerly, Percy’s implicit concern in establishing the Helen Keller realization and the subsequent urge to give name to everything is a double-edged marvel that elevates humankind and enables communication/knowledge/science and culture but it also separates us from all other species and from the world/experience/God.

In the eponymous essay, “Message in the Bottle,” Percy presents the extended metaphor of the island castaway, the person who has lost his place in the world even as he finds sanctuary among strangers. In this essay, more than any of the others in this collection, Percy makes explicit humankind’s almost innate state of being a stranger in a strange land—the result of our species’ extraordinary ability to use language and symbol to name, demarcate, and separate itself from the world. It is in this essay that Percy best captures that sense of aloneness that so easily shifts into despair, which he believes defines the character of the mid- to late-20th century Western man. Language itself alienates and yet offers up the Good News: this essay is a parable of the antinomy of the human condition.

So, how does language alienate/separate? Thought is not possible without language, since without language, the most that one can do is shuffle the memories of images, smells, sounds, and other experiences. Language, however, is experience sorted and ordered by name; it’s a shorthand for all the aspects of experience, even if, as we lament, it can’t capture everything (eg, the ineffable/sublime/metaphysical/spiritual). Humankind has made the cognitive leap into symbolizing all experience in a way that no other animal can (or has done), and words are the symbols we use to identify the bits and bobs of the world. A person’s direct experience is replaced with a mediating medium, and words and language almost instantaneously assert themselves as being the experience.

Percy’s essays are themselves a working out of a new metaphor for fallen humanity. While none of the little semiotic/language journals in which he published these essays would recognize Percy’s maneuver, it’s possible when they are aggregated to see that he means to set alongside the Fall—the Garden of Eden story—his own contemporary version of the myth, one in which the acquisition of the ability to name everything sets human beings apart from all that they have named… and all that could not be named.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm of the incorrigible opinion that old books are better. As a result I often find myself reading non-fiction that is hopelessly out of date because of recent developments in its subject matter. This is the case with The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy, a book of essays about linguistics published in 1975. I did it because I'm very sympathetic (so far) with his philosophical/theological point of view, and I like Percy himself as he emerges from his writings. I wish he were still alive so I could write to him.

Apart from my very subjective sympathy, the book is I believe valuable for a criticism of linguistic theory that I suspect (based on the little I know about linguistics) is still valid. It argues against the view in semiotics that human language is simply a complex derivation of the use of signs in animal behavior. Percy points out the crucial difference: the identification of what something is and its meaning for the perceiver. Pavlov's dog reacts to the sign of the bell by anticipating eating a steak, but (as far as we know) there's no conceptual identification of the bell or the steak, and no awareness of their meaning ("Ah, at last my hunger will be slaked most deliciously by one of my favorite dishes!"). The question of exactly what is going on when I identify and give meaning to something is, of course, the infamous problem of reference in linguistics which I now feel better prepared to tackle in more recent studies (if anyone reading this has any suggestions I'd be most grateful).

To return to my subjective ponderings, I can't help but think that Percy suspects (but would never say in a scientific paper) that there is theological significance to our ability to identify and assign meaning to things. The assertion of meaning is connected to an awareness of value, with concurrent possibilities for justice and beauty, good and evil. Can discovery of the physical bases for these conceptions (the cortical synapses or whatever) ever begin to account for their meaning to us? Can anything explain them other than reference to a realm of being that transcends the physical?

[Vibhu AV · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book by Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other, is a collection of essays, all of them touching upon the correlated issues of symbolic language in human beings and human being himself as a conscious animal. Percy was neither a practicing scientist (though trained as a physician) nor an anthropologist but was interested in philosophy and semiotics as an outsider (and a wonderful writer) which made him, in some sense, an ideal, unbiased observer and investigative reporter. The underlying problem that Percy intends to tackle is two-fold: why is the modern-day human being, despite all the scientific and technological advancements and comforts, still feels morose, dissatisfied, and generally “feels happy in bad situations and sad in good situations”? Why do we feel schadenfreude (savor other’s calamities)? Secondly, why has science left us—humans—an enigma while being able to grasp the deepest secrets of the physical world? The topics covered include the role of signs and symbols in communication between organisms, human beings as a conscious animal, symbolic language, and a search for the connection between symbol and consciousness.

In particular, the essay, “Culture: The Antinomy of the Scientific Method,” discusses how our current day science falls short when applied to our ubiquitous cultures and mythologies. A fascinating study. I’ve tried to summarize this essay on wiki below. FYI, my contribution on wiki re. the book is only for this particular essay. I didn’t write the summaries of the other essays of the book.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mes...

[David Doel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Don't let the title fool you; this is not the Walker Percy of "The Moviegoer" fiction. This is the slow, dry prose of a researcher with long words and obscure thoughts. If you are interested in the right fields of study, this selection of essays might interest you. But I suspect most Walker Percy fans will be disappointed by this title. Count me in this group.

During my career, I wrote several technical papers, primarily about gas turbines. To mimic what Walker Percy has done, I could collect those papers, give them chapter titles and numbers, and write an introduction and closing chapter. A small group of people might find that book interesting, but most would not, and would have difficulty following the text.

Linguistics is more widely of interest that gas path analysis, so Percy's book should have a larger audience than mine -- but it's still a small audience.

[Mia · Rating 4 out of 5]

This unusal book - even by Walker Percy standards - is really a collection of essays. The first five essays are a must read for any writer of prose or poetry. In fact, I would recommend them to any serious writer, including journalists. However, if you do not have a taste for abstract thought, this book probably is not for you. The final ten essays focus on semiotics, the development of language and what it does and does not tell us about us as human beings. Percy had an extreme interest in the depths and nuances of the English language - particularly the heretofore unexplored regions. You will not agree with everything he says and some of the examples he gives will strike you as odd or even off. But he will make you *think* about language and writing in many ways that you have not before. And, as with everything Percy wrote, there is a deeper, buried meaning that says something about who we are as human beings (as different from all other species). He examines the concept of the "self" and how certain types of languge can cause us to be more, or less, aliented from ourselves. Relatedly, he asks: Why do so many go through life in a seemingly unconscious state? What does it mean to be conscious? And, what subtle language and life events (however trivial) increase our consciousness? Percy displays a rare combination of honesty, depth, intellectual rigor, and a willingness to "go there" that few writers pull off. He'd admit this book is far from perfect. It's riddled with obscure references and (as someone clawing my way fluency in a foreign language) I can't help but wonder how different, and better, it would have been had Percy been fluent in a language other than English. Nonetheless, no matter how good your college writing professors were and no matter how good a writer you think you are: your writing, the way you think about language - and your ability to read critically - will improve after reading this book.

[Shelley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uncle Percy said I did not have to read all the essays. I have read 3 of the 15 so far and if I wasn't convinced before, I certainly am now, that Walker Percy is a genius. He spent 20 years trying to figure out what made man man and how language works and how it is linked to who man is. He would get depressed in between and write novels. In the second essay, he describes his realization, thanks to Helen Keller, that language and the understanding and being able to name things is not just a behavioral, cause and effect response, but that something much more is happening. The ability to listen to and understand a story cannot be explained by stimulus and response. I will read the other essays and enjoy every minute.

[Simon Stegall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly recommend the first half of this book. Percy's essays on perception and language are delightful when he stays in the realm of the literary, examining how culture and language effects our ability to perceive things as beautiful, meaningful, etc. Absolutely delightful. Will reread.

But the second half of the book takes a solid nose-dive into the concrete block of 1970s semiotic theory. Hoo boy. Interesting to some, no doubt, but held very little for me.

I confess I skimmed the last several chapters. Still, the first half is well worth even purchasing the book.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The parable of the man shipwrecked and how he responds to different messages, for example “there are diamonds on the next island “ vs “ there is fresh water on the next island “ is very thought provoking. I think it is a key insight on evangelization today; we’re not addressing a perceived need with our message.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't finish this all the way but the library wanted it back. Percy's a clear and lucid writer (of course) on topics that can be difficult and dense. Worth it just to see how he handles the subject and makes a usually tedious academic topic interesting enough to read.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Required reading for understanding the Trump presidency and his followers that "seem" to defy reason.

[Paschalis]

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[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essays on linguistics, while somewhat dated nevertheless essential background for understanding Percy's fictional oeuvre.

[Evie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hate theology class.

[Tamara · Rating 3 out of 5]

really interesting linguistics form of literary theory, later essays weren't quite as revelatory or intriguing, but this just reminds me to re-read Lost In The Cosmos.

[Lowry · Rating 5 out of 5]

(See my review of The Moviegoer.) In this book you will find, in discursive form, the ideas that all of Percy's novels are about. Which is not to say that they are dry or uninviting here; it's fascinating to see how they play out in a different genre of writing. Percy was essentially a philosopher of language, a student of how it is that we are able (or not) to make a meaning jump the gap from one human mind to another. If that interests you, and it is or should be a mighty interesting subject to anyone who actually wants to have a relationship with another person, I recommend reading this book. Several essays in this collection are classics: the title piece, "Metaphor as Mistake," and "The Loss of the Creature" come immediately to mind.

[Jon Trott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes, this book is about semiotics and all sorts of really cool stuff that makes your brain go "WoooOOOOO!" Trouble for me was that my brain, after a while, went "FZZzzzzzt" -- obviously not well enough wired to take in all that Percy talks about here. (For a one chapter rendition of the same stuff, see the chapter on semiotics in his "Lost in the Cosmos.")

[Camille · Rating 3 out of 5]

language theory and kind of ...antisemiotics? A bit over my head and out of date, and would have been more influential if he'd been listened to then. Now, kind of a curiosity for crystallizing at a tangent ideas that we've come to in a roundabout way (if you like to keep super close track of what Chomsky is or has been or may well be up to, this is may be more interesting to you.)