Complex vs. Common

713 Words3 Pages
In Walker Percy's essay “The Lost Creature,” he talks about the sovereignty of people. How people may gain a sovereign experience, how they may lose the sovereignty of their experience; and even how people can gain the sovereignty of an experience back after losing it. How people treat experiences determine whether they receive a sovereign experience or not, and it puts them into one of two categories: Complex, or Common. Specifically, common or complex tourist and students. Common people do not see things what they really are. Percy refers to this as a preformed symbolic complex. A preformed symbolic complex is a symbol of an object that one perceives it to be, before he or she sees the object. A key example of this in Percy's essay is when he says, “Why it is every bit as beautiful as a picture postcard!” (469). Percy put this in his essay while talking about a tourist seeing a post card of the Grand Canyon, and then deciding to go see it for him self. The tourist saying it is as beautiful as a picture postcard is a prime example of the preformed symbolic complex. The symbol that puts the preformed complex of the Grand Canyon in the tourist's head is the picture on the post card. There are multiple ways for the common person to lose the sovereignty of the experience. For example, if a common tourist decides to go to a national park, he or she would most likely take the beaten track. the beaten track is the path made to show the park under approved circumstances. Even though he refers to the Grand Canyon, Percy says “Seeing the canyon under approved circumstances is like seeing the symbolic complex head on.” (__). It is not only tourists that can be considered “common.” Students also can be put into this category. For students, everything they receive from the school board is considered part of an educational package. Looking at things through the educational
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