Today, I finished reading a profoundly bizarre (or bizarrely profound?) book, titled Lost in the Cosmos by Walker Percy. It presents itself as a parody of "self-help" books, with the difference being that, unlike its ancestors, its "questions of self-examination" are not contrived to enlighten the reader but to confuse him instead. The book posits that the mental (or dare I say "spiritual?") condition of humans has degenerated to the point where we are barely aware of our own selves (despite being "aware of ourselves" in an analytical sense); this central idea is illustrated through varying examples, some plausible and others outlandish.
What's most interesting is that Percy offers little to no definite explanation of the solution to the problem, but he instead leaves it to the reader to "work out the problem." The questions asked throughout the book come after a facet of "the problem" is identified, named, and elucidated - but at the very point where most authors would begin to insert their "solution," Percy asks the solution of you, and leaves it at that!
All that, and I seem only dimly aware of the actual meaning of the book. It seems to belong to that class of "philosophical" works that I keep on my shelves, like The Republic, which I perennially misunderstand but keep around anyways, in the hope that I will grow to understand them one day.
If that seems interesting to you, I would recommend the book, with the qualification that you will probably not agree with everything written in it (nor are you meant to). It isn't very long (262 pages of fairly large text, in my edition), and it should not take much reading to tell whether you are the sort of person who would appreciate it.
