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In response to an article posted by Kahlypso on the consideration of the addition of Lithium to water supplies I replied …

This story has already been told by Walker Percy in his novel The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). It has it all … drugs in the water supply, pedophiles, child molesters, Nazis … who could ask for more? His novel Love in the Ruins (1971) is, more or less, Volume 1 to Thanatos. But you need not have read Love in the Ruins prior to Thanatos. Each novel stands on its own. … From Thanatos, “How do I know what to do, Doctor? Why can’t you tell me? What I want to tell them is, this is not the Age of Enlightenment but the Age of Not Knowing
What to Do.” Percy wrote quite a bit of non-fiction as well. If you are feeling Lost in the Cosmos (I’m borrowing here the title of one of his non-fiction works) I recommend you give Percy a read. The following recommends Percy better than I could so …
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“That Mysterious Phenomenon”: The Affect of Percy’s Works upon Readers
by KENNETH LAINE KETNER

[Editor’s note — the author’s use of the term “affect” in the following essay is deliberate in light of its more “triadic” overtones in contrast to the “dyadic” nuances generally associated with the term “effect,” as illustrated by Percy’s theory of language.]
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In the letters gathered by Father Samway as A Thief of Peirce, on page seventy-five you will find me saying, “I’m not kidding about that ‘mysterious phenomenon’.”
What was I not kidding about?
Seventeen days earlier in my letter of 12 October 1988, one finds this paragraph.
I have to confess that all my plots to figure a way to meet you at a conference have failed. Now I got to play my hole card. If I were to get in my wife’s sturdy little car and drive over to Covington one of these days, would it be possible to enjoy the pleasure of your conversation and company in some manner or form? I’m busting with things to discuss, and corresponding about philosophy and literature and such is like trying to drink a cherry phosphate through a broken paper straw. Besides I want to see your face and shake your hand, and particularly to thank you directly for what you gave me. (I’m referring to that mysterious phenomenon: Read Walker’s books and fasten your seat belt, cause you gone on a ride, son.)
Elsewhere I described this affect as “Read Walker’s books then levitate above your old ways” (A Thief of Peirce, page 133). In language not involving flowery Chocktaw speech, this phenomenon could simply be seen as a transformation. Others — for instance Coles and Tolson — have shown that the syndrome is widespread among Percy’s readers.
I want to try to show a way, at least in outline, for understanding this mystery. Sometimes mysteries are paradoxical because the means available for understanding them are inadequate but we aren’t aware of the inadequacy — perhaps pride keeps us from a proper viewpoint. Maybe we need to look at the problem in one of those double mirrors that tailors use. Or maybe we need to walk home through a swamp. And sometimes when there is an improvement in our understanding, what was previously a mystery becomes a familiar friend.
Because of the brevity of our time together, I perpetrate an impropriety by appealing to an authority. Actually, I should say, this is not so much an argumentum ad verecundiam as it is expert testimony which is a somewhat more respectable mode of pleading. The expert is Walker Percy. And in place of a long defense of my points, as a temporary stop-gap to show that they are at least plausible points, from an appendix of A Thief of Peirce (page 167; in the same work compare also the last few lines of WP-KLK 25 July 1989 and WP-KLK 15 June 1989) I cite Mrs. Percy’s note to me:
I remember Walker greeting you in a little park across from the hotel in Washington and how pleased Walker was. He had on several occasions told me, “Bunt, this man knows what I am getting at.”
By the way, I still haven’t gotten over the experience of having my private correspondence splattered all over a book. I wonder when those odd feelings will pass?
In his Jefferson Lecture and in prior works, Percy argued that contemporary science has a self-understanding that is much too narrow. In effect science has limited its inquiry to certain kinds of phenomena, typically those associated with closed systems of dyadic relations. Percy was a magnificent artist. However, he was certainly also a scientist, but one who operated with a much wider view of the kinds of phenomena science can study. On the other hand, main-stream literary scholars have not understood Percy, for they are also, by and large, blinded by a kind of mirror-reversed image of the view that troubles main-stream contemporary science. Naturally, my own vision is limited, so I can only report that these matters appear to me as I have described. But I do think one can defend well the claim that Percy stood between these two groups.
He knew he had discovered a vision that could unite the two camps. He tried to talk to both of them. And he had good reason, because the findings from his studies constitute a bundle of ideas and principles that had the capacity to mediate between these differences. But those practicing conventional science could not see the scientific phenomena he held up for attention. Indeed, persons from that side of the line who might read him would be likely to write him off as just a novelist with some entertaining stories who in his spare time wrote a few confused essays about science. The literary party, on the other hand, seemed incapable to appreciate — or were uninterested in — his strong background as a scientist, and when he announced findings from his exploration of a new way of doing science, they misunderstood it because the received literary world view does not include a category for literature as science. (But there are a few exceptions — see Weinsheimer’s article for instance; however, he has since departed from the position taken in that essay, which of course should not detract from the strengths of this excellent piece.) Also on the whole, literary scholars are unaware of the work of Percy’s fellow scientist, Charles Peirce, who, as it can easily be demonstrated, inspired him continually since the 1950’s. So they sought instead to understand Percy in terms of existentialism which, while clearly relevant, is not enough by a long shot to form the complete picture.
Why am I mentioning this? Because I guess that the clues to understanding “that mysterious phenomenon” lie in this paradoxical zone which contains items discovered by those two scientists, Peirce and Percy. Of course, the regular scientists don’t acknowledge that there are such zones. And the regular literary folks know that such zones exist but are offended at the prospect that there could be any scientific understanding of the matter, which they gleefully celebrate as an impenetrable mystery. For myself, I want to chip away at understanding it using Walker’s advice. I will speak metaphorically and in a summary style. But I think that most if not all of the outline can be defended in boring technical detail.
What elements, then, can be assembled toward that end?
Let us begin in the pretransformation mode. It is the first turn. What can be said? It is ordinary, it is everyday routine, it is consistent with the world view of the age which in our case is a metaphysics of mechanicalism and physicalism and efficient causation in an environment. These are the philosophical positions that say that humankind and indeed each of us is a machine which “behaves” or reacts chemically or physically with our environment. It is interesting in this regard to note that Rene Descartes, the seventeenth century patron saint of contemporary behaviorism, was impressed by a set of statues in a royal garden which for the amusement of the sovereign had been fitted with early hydraulic devices so that they actually moved when the water pressure was up. This was Descartes’s model for the human creature. While our hydraulic insight is much better than that of seventeenth century speculators, our society at large is still stuck within the same logic that brought Descartes to this result. Another feature of this world view is the strong trust in causation as the master explanation strategy and in the individual intellect as the whole of a person’s being. I hope it is clear that I am starting with the condition of the reader as reading begins. It is obvious that there are a great many differences among readers, but aren’t there some similarities, at least among many readers, and especially among those who eventually experience the mysterious phenomenon?