Packaged with a Bow

Walker Percy's "The Loss of the Creature" was my favorite piece that we read this year. I liked his style of writing even though it was kind of confusing and the ideas that he brought up were things that I like to think about. He talks about packaging and how our expectations let us down more often then we realize, especially with his Grand Canyon reference relating to travel. He also talks about experiences and how we perceive them based on someone else's view. Earlier in my blog I touched on the question of authenticity that he brings up, but in this post I want to discuss the packaging term he uses in his writing. 

In part II of "The Loss of the Creature" Percy talks about the educational package where he combines Biology and English. In English we are often taught how to read sonnets and poems by one teacher during one class. Often times they will tell you the meaning of the poem before you have read it and analyzed it by yourself. If teachers were to to let students analyze works themselves without Googling the meaning or giving them any hints, there would be many different interpretations because English, especially older English poems, are often very difficult to understand. There would probably be "incorrect" interpretations, if one could even call them "incorrect" because how do we know what the real meaning of anything is? He talks about how the sonnet particularly is portrayed in the educational package, and how in 20 years we are less likely to remember the actual meaning of the sonnet, instead we will remember the "package" of the sonnet and the educator teaching what the sonnet was about. 

I really liked Percy's connection between studying a sonnet and dissecting a dogfish. I think I related to this personally because I have always loved zoology / environmental science and writing equally. I think it's important for students to be well rounded in their education, for example engineering majors that know how to write an essay. Percy connects scientist and poets in their studies as having an indirect approach to learning and even though the scientists have to be more rigid in their procedures, they are both searching for the truth.