Percy Jackson's Journey

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First, Percy introduces his argument alluding to the discovery of the Grand Canyon. Percy argues that the amazement that Garcia Lopez de Cardenas felt when he discovered the Grand Canyon is set by a circumstance. Percy then purposes the question of whether others can experience the same feeling and excitement as Cardenas. Ironically, Percy himself has already answered the question, “Every explorer names his island Formosa, beautiful. To him it is beautiful because, being first, he has access to it and can see it for what it is. But to no one else is it ever as beautiful—except the rare man who manages to recover it, who knows that it has to be recovered” (298). Since the canyon has now been exposed commercially, when the sightseer views the…show more content…
Percy then introduces the ways in which individuals can recover the Grand Canyon: “leaving the beaten track,” or go back “to the beaten track but at a level above it” (299). Overall, Percy encourages people to not follow any pre-set sightseeing or traveling, but to allow their spontaneity and personal nature to appreciate the art of objects. However, Percy does acknowledge that it is hard for the human race to recover their enjoyment of the sight, because the symbolic packaging is unavoidable. It will be genuine if humans do not seek any confirmation in the process. To Percy, it is important to note that individuals should only enjoy their experience, without any regards for social approval, and that they should not want to “certify their experience” (303). If people are asking for certification, then it only means that they are asking for acceptable experiences according to the societal standards. In addition, Percy’s diction further reinforces the idea that people are too weighed down by the need of social approval that whatever they present to others requires an expert’s…show more content…
Percy approaches the matter through the presentation of a spontaneous interaction between an individual and his subject, just like between the sightseer and the Grand Canyon. To give it meaning, Percy argues that “[a] student who has the desire to get at a dogfish or a Shakespeare sonnet may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented” (306). To dig further, the media through which the dogfish and the Shakespeare sonnet are presented also pose additional difficulty for students, as they have to get around it to discover the meaning of the piece. Percy remarks that students see themselves “as [consumers] receiving an experience-package,” a rather passive and forced experience (306). Everything that the students received is “rendered invisible by a shift of reality from concrete thing to theory” (307). Students, however, are given specific and detailed instructions as to how to dissect a dogfish, how to interpret a poem—leaving no room for their own imaginary and creativity. Similarly to the first part of the essay, Percy also advises the students to recover their limited learning experience: it is able to be achieved by by “avoiding the educator’s direct presentation of the object as a lesson to be learned and restoring access to sonnet and dogfish as beings to be known,
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