Walker Percy

Percy makes several points with regard to how sovereignty can be lost, whether through the existence of preformed complexes or through the incorporation of experts into a situation.

Another difficulty for Percy is the loss of sovereignty.

Percy states, “The highest point, the term of the sightseer’s satisfaction, is not the sovereign discovery of the thing before him; it is rather the measuring up of the thing to the preformed symbolic complex. He maintains that students will learn more efficiently if they experience the subject. ” When we are experiencing something instead of perceiving it based on its own merits, we try to see what we have already learned about that place or subject. The highest satisfaction of the sightseer is that his sight should be certified as genuine”(571). He also describes how it is possible to regain lost sovereignty in some effective, though difficult, ways. Percy talks about a man who find a dogfish on the beach and examines it with his knife and a professor digging through the carcass with a broken fingernail instead of using the tools of laboratory. For Percy students are unable to enjoy the natural surprise of discovery. If expert approves their experience they would be happy to find an “unspoiled” place. We should approach to life as an experience have not discovered before. Best example for this is World Trade Center maybe after September 11 more tourists come to visit Grand zero than before it collapsed. Percy recommends recovery through “national disaster” or “a break down of symbolic machinery”(567). He suggests to choose the road less traveled by. He also wants us to make a track of our own and choose our own direction.