Detail of a frame from Mad Men Season 4, Episode 2, ‘Christmas Comes but Once a Year’
[W]hat is not generally recognized is that the successful launch of self into the orbit of transcendence is necessarily attended by problems of reentry. What goes up must come down. The best film of the year ends at nine o’clock. What to do at ten? […]
Options of reentry into [the everyday] world [include]: […]
(4) Reentry by travel (sexual). One has a succession of lovers […]. It is difficult to imagine the self of the autonomous artist in his singular and godlike abstraction from the ordinary world of men settling down with a wife and family any more than Jove settling down with Juno. Juno — yuck! […] Better to grow old alone in the desert, sit on a rock like a Navajo. But how lovely are the daughters of men! Indeed, heterosexual intercourse is the very paradigm of the reentry of the ghost-self back into the incarnate world whence it came.
–Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2011), Nook edition, chap. 14.
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Frame from Mad Men Season 7, Episode 7, ‘Waterloo’
ROGER STERLING (July 21, 1969)
Did you see we landed on the moon? Neil Armstrong, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Screw every girl in Florida, I guess.
–Carly Wray and Matthew Weiner, Mad Men, Season 7, Episode 7 (‘Waterloo’)
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