But while the spectacle of doomed efforts at "reentry" into the cosmos offers plenty of targets for Percy's gallows humor, he obviously has a lingering sympathy for honest, old-fashioned modes of transcendence (e.g., Christianity and high art), and he rejects out of hand positivism, village-atheism, and various counsels of despair. attempts to communicate with chimps, manic plunges into sex, drugs, booze, and so forth. The self seems to be hopelessly alienated from the cosmos-whence the quest for E.T.s. For, as Percy notes in a long "intermezzo" on semiotics, "the self of the sign-user can never be grasped." This variation on a familiar phenomenological theme (the self's irreducible subjectivity, you can't simultaneously know and perceive yourself knowing, etc.) leaves us with something like nihilism. a wasteland, its values decayed, its community fragmented, its morals corrupted, its cities in ruins," with traditional religion so untenable and secular therapies so trivial, the self is inevitably driven inward, only to find a peculiar void. This rambling philosophical entertainment combines snappy little lectures, multiple choice questions, diagrams, "thought experiments," and bits of science fiction in a kind of rueful Percyflage about the fate of the self in a crazy, centrifugal world.
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