Free Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book by Walker Percy

Imagine that you are a member of a tour visiting Greece. The group goes to the Parthenon. It is a bore. Few people even bother to look—it looked better in the brochure. So people take half a look, mostly take pictures, remark on the serious erosion by acid rain. You are puzzled. Why should one of the glories and fonts of Western civilization, viewed under pleasant conditions—good weather, good hotel room, good food, good guide—be a bore?
    Now imagine under what set of circumstances a viewing of the Parthenon would not be a bore. For example, you are a NATO colonel defending Greece against a Soviet assault. You are in a bunker in downtown Athens, binoculars propped on sandbags. It is dawn. A medium-range missile attack is under way. Half a million Greeks are dead. Two missiles bracket the Parthenon. The next will surely be a hit. Between columns of smoke, a ray of golden light catches the portico.
    Are you bored? Can you see the Parthenon?
    Explain.

(11) The Depressed Self:
    Whether the Self is Depressed because there is Something Wrong with it or whether Depression is a Normal Response to a Deranged World

    THE SUICIDE RATE among persons under twenty-five has risen dramatically in the last twenty years.
    A recent survey disclosed that the symptom of depression outnumbered all other medical symptoms put together.
    On a daytime radio psychotherapy talk show, 80 percent of all women calling in reported that they were depressed.
    The incidence of drug use in teenagers and preteens has increased an estimated 3000 percent in the last thirty years. On a recent talk show on “tough love,” it was claimed that about one-third of all teenagers were depressed. Of the one-third, as many as 75 percent were on drugs.
    In one small Southern city, a study of the families of the upper socioeconomic class revealed that 79 percent of the daughters left home after high school, moved into apartments, and either attended college or got jobs. After five years, 53 percent of the unmarried daughters had returned to the homes of their parents and 43 percent of the married daughters … Typical responses: “I didn’t like it out there.” “It is too much.” “I couldn’t cope.” “I got sad.”
    In one Midwestern town, 27 percent of high-school students dropped out and stayed home. Chief complaint: “I can’t cope.”
    Question (I): Are people depressed despite unprecedented opportunities for education, vocations, self-growth, cultural enrichment, travel, and recreation
    (a) Because modern life is more difficult, complex, and stressful than it has ever been before?
    (b) Because, for men, competition in the marketplace is fiercer than ever?
    (c) Because, for women, life as a housewife is lonelier than ever, what with the vanishing of the traditional community of women around the well, sitting on stoops, gossiping over back fences?
    (d) Because, for young people, education is more inferior than ever, leaving one unprepared to face the real world?
    (e) Because belief in God and religion has declined and with it man’s confidence in the place of the self in the Cosmos, in the Chain of Being, and in its relation to others?
    (f) Because the self nowadays is other-directed rather than inner-directed and depends for its self-esteem on its perception of how others evaluate it—something like a beggar in a crowd with his hand out?
    (g) Because the self, despite an embarrassment of riches, is in fact impoverished and deprived, like Lazarus at the feast, having suffered a radical deprivation and loss of sovereignty? With the multiplication of technologies and the ascendance of experts and expertise in all fields, the self has consented to the expropriation of every sector of life by its appropriate expert—even the expropriation of its, the self’s, own life. “I’m depressed, Doctor. What’s wrong with me? If you are not an expert in the field, a doctor of depression, can you refer me to one?”
    Thus, the rightful legatee of the