To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it

But to no one else is it ever as beautiful

Except the rare man who manages to recover it,

-Walker Percy,

The Loss of the Creature

With this opening paragraph, Walker Percy concentrates the essence of an entire essay into two neat lines. But what does it mean? What does the title The Loss of the Creature mean? Walker Percy seems to ask throughout his essay how man can enrich his life, how he can truly, honestly enjoy and understand the surrounding world and all it has to offer.

He begins with an example of the Grand Canyon, how no one can truly appreciate it as its discoverer. He seems to believe throughout the example that there are some basic things that disallow men to fully appreciate the canyon; expectations, a need to preserve the “memory”, the “improving“ of the canyon, and even over observation.

Expectations are elicited from postcards, pictures, travel brochures, and the like

During the writing of this critical essay, I lost my original copy of The Loss of the Creature. After a few days, I finally got around to downloading another copy of it. My copier printed the pages in a way that put the last page on the top, thus making it the first page I saw. Upon looking at it, it was so clear and lucid that I thought I had accidentally printed a pre-written critical essay from some cheat site. Turning to the front page, I saw the opening paragraphs, confirming to me that this was Percy’s work. All of a sudden, the true meaning of Walker Percy struck me.

He uses the situation of a young boy finding a dogfish and exploring it as opposed to the college student studying it for a grade in a laboratory. Who is learning more, the student or the boy. The student carefully examines every part of the dogfish, recording his finding carefully, making no mistakes with his precision instruments, taking great pains to do the dissection correctly. The boy takes out his jackknife and goes to work right there on the beach. Who learned more? Well, the college student learned much about the dogfish’s anatomy on a scientific level, but only because he had to. He had no choice in the matter, so the information he “learned” will be easily forgotten after the lesson or test or paper he must write. Although a valid method of learning fact, he still looks not through his own eyes, but through the eyes of the lab. The boy, though, did what he did because he wanted to, not because he had to. He wanted to know what was inside that dogfish. So while the quantity that he learned might be less, the quality is likely much higher, as he will remember his little impromptu experiment as a memory, not a series of scientific facts.

They are constantly worried that their image might be destroyed, breaking the bubble of charm they have built. As long as these doubts and fears and needs of affirmation are present, there is little room left for “It.”

Percy stresses the value of an object over its title, of quality of understanding over quantity, of substance over mass. As Alanis Morsette said, “It’s like ten thousand spoons, when all you need is a knife.” A man can analyze this work with a million pages of essay, and still not cover every meaning, every facet, every value of Percy’s work, as there is an infinite number of these inside the piece. He could write a hundred pages about every individual word, but not come close for the infinite meaning that is in the infinitely small spaces between each word, between each letter. By now, it feels that I have written an infinitely huge essay, despite the fact that it is nowhere near to encompassing all of the truths to be found within The Death of the Creature. So I admit defeat in finding them.

Some topics in this essay:
Grand Canyon, Brave World, Park Service, Walker Percy, Alanis Morsette, Loss Creature, Garcia Lopez, , Death Creature, grand canyon, walker percy, wonder canyon, college student, critical essay, loss creature, percy suggests, beauty canyon, own eyes, donkey rides,