Read With Welty: Lost in the Cosmos

Tracy Carr

Library Services Director

Our Read with Welty reading challenge encourages you to read 12 books from Welty’s home library at your own pace—over the next weeks, months, or even year! Each week, we’ll explore one of the books here.

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

When I try to explain Lost in the Cosmos to people, I usually say, “Well, it’s a kind of weird fake self-help book that’s also sort of serious and metaphysical.” That’s a little hard to explain, so I usually describe this passage from the very beginning of the book:

Now imagine that you are reading the newspaper. You come to the astrology column. You may or may not believe in astrology, but to judge from the popularity of astrology these days, you will probably read your horoscope. According to a recent poll, more Americans set store in astrology than in science or God.

You are an Aries. You open your newspaper to the astrology column and read an analysis of the Aries personality. It says, among other things:

You have the knack of creating an atmosphere of thought and movement, unhampered by petty jealousies. But you have the tendency to scatter your talents to the four winds.

Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.

Suddenly, you realize you’ve made a mistake. You’ve read the Gemini column. So you go back to Aries:

Nothing hurts you more than to be unjustly mistreated or suspected. But you have a way about you, a gift for seeing things through despite all obstacles and distractions. You also have a desperate need to be liked. So you have been wounded more often than you will admit.

Hm, you say, quite true. I’m like that.

Lost in the Cosmos is really about the search for self—and why it’s so hard for us to understand and recognize ourselves. We walk around in our own heads all day, and still we don’t understand ourselves! Why is this? Percy gives us many, many chances to figure this out, with scenarios like the above, quizzes (“Is amnesia a favorite device in fiction and especially soap operas because…”), thought experiments, psychology, psychiatry, aliens (!), charts, and more. Is this book satirical or serious? I think it’s a bit of both: a tongue-in-cheek way to get us to explore our own humanity.

Eudora Welty and Walker Percy were friends and contemporaries. In a March 17, 1988 with Percy’s biographer Patrick Samway, Welty said, “All of his writings fascinate me. I know they go into some type of depth I don’t even realize. I know enough to get the force of the feeling and poetic strength and all the things that mean so much to me.”