"If a man is deprives of the means of being a self in a world made over by science for his use and enjoyment, he is like a ghost at a feast. He becomes invisible. That is why people in the modern age took photographs by the million: to prove despite their deepest suspicions to the contrary that they were not invisible."
Percy identifies the expression of the individual as one innate to the experience of self. When one is not allowed to express the self in this contemporary age, one is led to a paradox of experience. The culture invites full expression and individualism, but the specific individual is denied use of these pleasures, leading to a great sense of alienation and even insignificance.
"The surest sign that an age is coming to an end is the paradoxical movement of the most sensitive souls of the age, the artists and writers first, then the youth, in a direction exactly opposite to the direction laid down by the theory of the age."
Speaking to the end of an era, Percy marks the shift as a sort of interpretation of signs. By looking to the young people and the artists he believes the end can be predicted fairly accurately. There is an inevitable reversal of temperament and ideals, even if this opposition doesn't necessarily indicate the new position which will result after the shift.
"By the very cogent anthropology of Judeo-Christianity, whether or not one agreed with it, human existence was by no means to be understood as the transaction of a higher organism satisfying this or that need from its environment, by being 'creative' or enjoying 'meaningful relationships,' but as the journey of a wayfarer along life's way."
Percy identifies this distinction between the message of contemporary society and that of the majority of human history. In previous generations life was viewed as a quest, something temporary, but people today pursue this idea of making meaning out of their experiences. The individualism which pervades modern cultures is easily identified in this distinction. Although one may disagree with the origins of civilization, its consequences in our genes cannot be ignored.
"What theorists of the old modern age had to confront were the altogether unexpected disasters of the twentieth century: that after three hundred years of the scientific revolution and in the emergence of rational ethics in European Christendom, Western man in the twentieth century elected instead of an era of peace and freedom an orgy of wars, tortures, genocide, suicide, murder, and rapine unparalleled in history."
Percy points out an obvious but uncomfortable truth about the recent century. Along the course of human history, progress led to a continual rejection of violence, emphasizing instead rationality and ethics. In the twentieth century, however, mankind chose war and death over any sort of peace or communal work to progress. Percy promises some difficult truths in this essay collection, but few are as astonishing as this line.
