Walker's essay seems to suggest that we live to discover the symbolism of life and unravel it's complexities by actively seeking them out.

Walker Percy's essay, "The Loss of Creature" maintains that we should "recover the creature" and learn to "extract the thing from the package." However, we can never exclusively recover the creature from the "symbolic package," for we are in a process of continuous discovery throughout our lives and we must see the symbolic complex for more than it appears to be. Percy's methods of perceiving the world are in fact impossible to put into effect …

… may be their "creature" than they would. The opposing force in "recovering the creature" and becoming our own "sovereigns" is not in the destination nor the object that we see before us, but the adversity lies in the way we go about searching for "it." If we only opened our minds and learned to conceive of our own thoughts and ideas perhaps we truly would "catch fire at the beauty of it."