BitterSweetLife

Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos is a book that almost defies description. The L.A. Times Book Review called it "a mock self-help book designed not to help but to provoke; a chapbook to inveigle us into thinking about who we are and how we got into this mess." I can't really improve on that, and I particularly like the fact that the reviewer said "inveigle," which is good for an honorary membership in the Vocabulary Reclamation Project. I would only add that, however deliberately elusive Percy is--you feel as if he's hunting you, circling your personality like a tiger, assessing its vulnerabilities--his insight into the vacuity of the human soul is scalpel-sharp, perhaps frightening.

I say this only to introduce a quote that I found on page 147.

The painter and the sculptor are the Catholics of art, the writer is the Protestant. The former have the sacramentals, the concrete intermediaries between themselves and creation--the paint, the brushes, the fruit, the bowl, the table, the model, the mountain, the handling and muscling of clay. The writer is the Protestant. He works along in a room as bare as a Quaker meeting house with nothing between him and his art but a Scripto pencil, like God's finger touching Adam. It is harder on the nerves.