A review by bibliocyclist
The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other by Walker Percy

challenging reflective slow-paced

4.0

Is flesh grass?  “Is looking like sucking: the more lookers, the less there is to see?”  Can our consciousness of the corn dance escape the consciousness of our consciousness, and does this certify the experience or nullify it?  To decide, check out the linguistic and cultural exploration The Message in the Bottle by Walker Percy.  Consider yourself adrift down your own Mississippi to the very delta of the mind, and know that “there is always that which lies around the bend.”  Examine what happens when utopias don’t work, recapture a present that is too often surrendered to the past or the future, and gaze upon a literary bonfire in which “words are potent agents and the sparks are bound to fly.”  Delve as deeply as you dare into the self, the other and society, and ask yourself if there is “any difference, no difference, or the greatest possible difference, between that which I privately apprehend and that which I apprehend and you validate by naming in such a way that I am justified in hoping that you ‘mean’ that very ineffable thing?”