Walker Percy The Loss Of The Creature Analysis

Packaged, Formulated, and Filtered In “The Loss of the Creature,” Walker Percy describes how the modern society presents packaged experience to people and how the true values of experience via confrontation is being ruined because of that “preformed complex” (460). The travelers these days in the Grand Canyon will not see the same values and beauty that Garcia López de Cárdenas did, because they already pre-experienced the values of the Grand Canyon via “appropriated symbolic complex”; Percy describes this as the difference between the “sightseers” and “discoverers,” saying, “the thing is no longer the thing as it confronted” (459). The couple traveling in Mexico, who accidently ends up staying at a town that they never planned to visit, will enjoy their trip. They still are mere “sightseers,” however, even after all those experiences since they desire a certification from someone that their “experience as genuine,” that their trip was not a failure, without wanting to know the actual depth and the meaning of what they went through; “The highest satisfaction of the sightseer is that
In the part II of the essay, Percy describes how education today is taking away the opportunity to encounter the true values of the subjects from the students by educationally packaging those values (466 – 467). Since the educators are transmitting those values in such formulated media, the students miss their chances to explore creatures like Shakespeare sonnet and dogfish on their own (Percy 467). The worst part of all is, in those three cases, that they all are not aware that “the thing is lost through such packaging” (Percy 470). Annie Dillard also discusses how our experience is being filtered as well in her essay “Seeing.” There are many things that keep us from seeing all the hidden surprise in life; they could be biological limitations as humans, whether being loved or not, culture and language…etc. She compares seeing things with these