After reading Percy’s essay The Loss of the Creature, my ideas of a liberal arts college experience was really influenced by his ideas. In his essay, he discusses ideas including “preformed symbolic complex.” In the first picture of my dorm room, this is a typical example of preformed symbolic complex. Ever since before I came to college, I always pictured what it would be like in my mind. How classes would be, what the campus would look like, how my room would be arranged. I always had this vision of what college would be like from what I’d see in movies and what others would tell me, like this was what it was supposed to be like. The picture of all the books on my desk is also another example of Liberal Arts College and another typical example of preformed symbolic complex. After reading this essay, I realized his ideas were very true and I had a much different view on college.
Another thing Percy talks about in his essay is “consumer receiving an experience-package.” When it comes to this idea, it is basically saying that everything is laid out for us in school now days. We don’t need to make our own choices anymore, everything is done for us, and we just have to take it as it comes to us and make something of it. Liberal arts open a variety of different courses for us to study. And in this, we are given the opportunity to take or leave the knowledge and use it. It is all laid out for us and all we have to do is use it and make the right choices. It is the same basic idea that we are free to keep our mind open to many different courses and learn what we want.
In the picture of the white board and me holding a baseball in one hand and a book in the other, you see an example of “consumer receiving an experience-package.” They both show how I am offered plenty of knowledge and it is my choice of whether or not I want to take this information and use it. When I hold the book in one hand and the baseball in the other, this shows me being given the choice to take what I have been offered and decide whether or not I want to use the knowledge or not.
