Walker Percy, the author of The Loss of the Creature, saw the world in a very unique way. Throughout his essay he points out many examples of how one has lost an experience through various "symbolic complexes- and by the means of trying to achieve that experience. In its most simplistic form, Percy's ideas easily generalize to commonly shared experiences. It is because of how common place and how imbedded these problems are in our everyday culture, that Percy fails to identify any realistic ways to rectify the situations. .
Percy starts the essay by discussing that through preconceived notions and the loss of sovereignty people loose the ability to have experiences. He begins his argument with an example of a tourist that has wanted to see the Grand Canyon all his life, finally gets his chance, and then unknowingly sees the canyon as compared to his expectations. Percy states that the tourist did not have the same experience as Cardenas, the original explorer that found the Grand Canyon. Percy is quick to identify those distractions from other tourists, nearby hotels, artificial fences, and other facets of modern day tourism had taken away, or diminished from the total experience of the canyon. He hypothesized that if the value P, represented all that was to be experienced at the Grand Canyon, and a million sightseers visit the Grand Canyon on that day; the experience would be diminished and divided amongst the population of tourist present; so that "a single sightseer does not receive value P, but a millionth part of value P."" (Percy 46) In theory I can understand that the value of being engulfed by a place and surrounded by the very stimuli that forms the experience can be of higher value then being surrounded by the distractions of tourism and all that is packaged with it. I can directly relate to this proposed diminishing of experience because I used to go hiking in the mountains of Main.
