Kind of hoarse and kind of puzzled

After reading this essay and attempting to decode it (yes, it was like IB come back again) piece by piece, i was left with one main question: and we are supposed to fix this how? It felt like the whole essay was telling us we were helpless creatures and that we were all slaves to something uncontrolable. Mr. Percy gave example after example and all that I could draw from it was that it was impossible to escape the hole that humanity has dug itself into. After reading this, my only question was really “How?”. How do we fix this? How do we truly enjoy an experience? How do we get out of this rather cynical view of life?

At first I struggled with Mr. Percy’s attempt to turn his ideas into a math problem, because it seemed out of place; but then I just accepted the fact that it was there and meant to convey his point and I moved on. Sometimes I had trouble following the author’s train of thought, so I would have to reread a passage a second time. There were times, towards the end of the essay, when I had trouble identifying with what Mr. Percy was trying to say, as if I couldn’t quite agree with it or believe it.

We can relate this essay to our discussion of cliche because Mr. Percy is saying that life is a cliche in that experiences are never really unique, but are instead clouded by our preconceived notions and from the perspectives of other people.

I think that Mr. Percy makes an interesting, if not verbose, argument that people aren’t really experiencing life for themselves but are living off of expectations and stereotypes.