Walker Percy, in his essay The Loss of the Creature establishes that preconceived notions formed by items such as postcards ruin a person’s experience of the Grand Canyon. Po

“The [postcard] is obscured by the symbolic package which is formulated not by the [postcard] itself but by the media through which the [postcard] is transmitted, the media which the educators believe for some reason to be transparent.” (Percy 431)

stcards give the viewer an image in their mind of what they expect the Grand Canyon to be, it must look like the postcard. As he explains in his essay:

While media may edit the postcard and force it to look like they want, attracting the kind of crowd that they want to attract, to post-concieved notions it will do nothing. Whatever my experience of the Grand Canyon formed in my mind is what will be displayed in this media obscured postcard. Post-conception makes the postcard not painful anymore, it is now exactly what you saw the Grand Canyon to be, your memory making the postcard your own personal experience.

While Percy assumes that postcards are a form of pre-formulation, obstructing the view of the Grand Canyon, he is surely putting to little faith in the people approaching this site. He marks the human race with the title “Symbolic Complex” presuming rather haughtily that a person belittles the experience of the Grand Canyon simply comparing it to a postcard in his mind and deciding if it compares or doesn’t. People are far more open-minded then Percy gives them credit for. For example, upon finally visiting Cinderella’s Castle, the postcard that I had seen of it for years suddenly became a useless piece of paper. The castle became an experience. Standing below the large structure, my eyes moving along the edges of the castle, its beauty seemed far more extravagant then displayed in any postcard. While Percy feels we are just comparing to preconceived notions, I think standing in front of that castle is where I formed my post-Conceived notion of the experience. My viewings of that day forward take my mind back to my childhood standing in front of the massive structure. I experienced the “it.”

Percy’s idea of the Symbolic Complex is not so strange. Writer Annie Dillard has a similar idea, but under a different name. In her book A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard decides that seeing is blurred by the preconceptions formed by not only postcards and magazine ads, but by society and what you are looking at. This preconceived notion is what makes seeing d

Some topics in this essay:
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