Peachy Keen's Reviews > Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book

Maybe not *quite* 4-stars. I had a hard time deciding between 3 and 4. (I'd have had a hard time decided between 3.5 and 4, too.)

It's a strange book. It's not nihilistic, but the comparison is there. Nihilism is, perhaps, a belief that there's no inherent meaning in existence, and seems dismissive toward the consideration, "Ok, well where do we go from there?" With Percy (and I've read only "The Moviegoer" and this book), he's not dismissive, and in fact it seems a real concern for him. The influences of Kierkegaard shine brightly especially in this book: how--upon finding we don't understand ourselves or our place in the cosmos--do we resist falling into a hole of despair?

In "Sickness Unto Death," Kierkegaard delineates at least 3 different types of despairs, that amount to lack of self-awareness (delusion), trying too hard to be a self (defiance, pride), trying too hard not to be one's self (yearning to be someone else, self-loathing). These are all formulations of ignoring or powering over the existential crisis of the self (the "sickness," a consequence of human freedom, that we have til death).

Percy, with great humor (Kierk would approve, as a lover of irony), develops great little vignettes and questions that expose the reader's self-crisis. (I recommend actually answering the questions, or trying to. With some, it's clear it's less of a question and more of Percy making a point.) One of my favorites was a vignette about one's neighbor receiving bountiful good fortune of various sorts and asking how the reader would receive it--and be honest! Is it genuinely good news, or publicly good, but secretly bad news? And if the latter, would it be better if suddenly he almost died and you saved his life? (Yes, yes it would. This was the option I chose.)

But the book just doesn't really come together. I liked the semiotics stuff, but it really is an interlude. He doesn't really *use* it much. The idea in this section is that to the extend we understand the world, we do through signs: through classifying and analyzing things. But we don't have a sign for the self (or semiotics of self) because it's such an unknown thing. So, he tries to sketch one out, but it is pretty simplistic (not least because he tries to consider so many types of "selves" and no one would fall neatly into any such category). And then he abandons it, but I don't recall his giving an explanation of what he's up to.

I do think it's probably the best self-help book, at least of the ones I've read, since those--and probably many others--are written by people who are making guesses (and who knows how educated those guesses are), with almost no recognition of the fallibility of those guesses, or even that they basically *are* guesses. There's no humble "hey this worked for me, maybe it'll work for you"-- instead it's "This worked for me, so you should do it too."

But, ultimately, I think the book was trying too hard to be different. It's one thing to be left puzzled about things, which is enjoyable and a starting point for thinking about them. This book seemed too disjointed to me. There's not much even of a starting point by the end. Instead, it's just *over.* Much like, I guess, the end of my life will probably feel. Maybe that was Percy's point. I wish I knew.