Aliens

By R.Z. Sheppard

LOST IN THE COSMOS By Walker Percy Farrar, Straus & Giroux 262 pages; $14.95

Walker Percy subtitles this witty, philosophical miscellany The Last Self-Help Book. The designation is ironic because Percy doubts that "self can help itself or, with apologies to Socrates, even know itself. The pith of his bad news goes something like this: scientific observation explains the world wonderfully but cannot explain the nature of the self without dispiriting results. The reason is that science reduces the mysterious entity to chemical interactions and sets of behavior. This does little for the craving that myth and religion once satisfied. The result is that with the shortening of these old perspectives, the self has become a restless ghost trapped in its own mechanical creation.

Percy is aware that this forbidding subject requires a light touch. In fact, most readers know the author as the genteel Louisianian who wrote such mournfully charming novels as The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins. But there is also Percy the Dixie Kierkegaard who wrote The Message in the Bottle. That 1975 collection of essays attempted to relieve the ache of self-estrangement by arguing that humankind was the glory of the universe because it was the only known species that used language (as distinguished from the intelligent communication of chimps and dolphins).

Lost in the Cosmos turns this brain-twisting topic into a sort of game show. Percy's questions span what he calls the deranged world from Descartes to "Dear Abby." The reader is provided multiple-choice answers. None are wrong, but some are more correct than others. Sample question: "If you are a shy person, is it better to accept your shyness, or to seek help from a psychotherapist?" Sample answers: "It is better to seek help from a psychotherapist because it is better not to suffer than to suffer ... It is better to read a book about how to get over being shy, because one might learn a helpful thing or two... It is better to seek help from a psychotherapist if the psychotherapist knows what not many psychotherapists know, namely, that the shy person may know something the nonshy person does not know, that your self is indeed unformulable to yourself, that you are entitled to your shyness, that, indeed, varying degrees of idiocy are required not to be shy."

This format gives Percy broad license for commentary, the most trenchant presented in a theological framework. Painters and sculptors, for example, are the Roman Catholics of art, their tools and materials are sacramental objects. Writers are the Protestants, working alone in a bare room with only a pencil, "like God's finger touching Adam."

Percy's specialty is the gentle chiding of a generation that came of age blowing its mind and ended up blow-drying its hair. Trivializing disturbs him: "The rational Jeffersonian pursuit of happiness embarked upon in the American Revolution translates into the flaky euphoria of the late 20th century"; Hugh Hefner is a Don Giovanni as written by Mantovani, not Mozart; popular Astronomer Carl Sagan's Cosmos is "a splendid picture book" but a work of "vulgar scientism" that ignores thousands of years of Western religious thought that laid the groundwork for modern science.

Percy's Cosmos is more challenging than Sagan's because the remote possibility of contacting extraterrestrials palls before a mankind that is alien to itself. Running off to the stars may be far simpler than exploring the black holes of human nature. Percy illustrates this best in a slice of imaginative speculation about four astronauts on an 18-year interstellar flight. The crew, three women and a man, practice "serial monogamy" and procreate. The 186,000-mile-per-second speed law is in effect, so nearly two decades in space amount to more than 400 years on earth. The astrofamily returns to find the home planet ruined by old nuclear wars and the survivors barely able to reproduce. But basic physical and spiritual urges persist.

Fiction and nonfiction are humorously blended in this 40-page space odyssey. As he does in the rest of the book, Percy avoids theatrical mysticism. "The modern objective consciousness," he argues, "will go to any length to prove that it is not unique in the Cosmos, and by this very effort establishes its own uniqueness. Name another entity in the Cosmos which tries to prove it is not unique." Name another voice in American writing that is as beguiling and as civilized as Walker Percy's.

--By R.Z. Sheppard This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.