Posted on 04/30/2021 7:56:06 AM PDT by Kaslin
The classics are classics for a reason and offer valuable, time-worn lessons about humanity itself.
We were excited to see the sign at the Lansing Mall: Barnes and Noble Booksellers. My roommate and I, on our spring break excursions, were shopping in another city when we spotted the national bookselling chain. We envisioned a long hour of perusing the great books — from Cicero to Tolstoy, Shakespeare to Dickens, Plato to Faulkner. My roommate joked she never made it out of a bookstore without purchasing at least one volume.
After walking through a maze of board games, Harry Potter paraphernalia, and $10 romance novels, we found the classics “section” — a barely 10-foot-wide corner where “Hamlet” was shoved up beside “The Catcher in the Rye” in an uneven pile. For all that the store owners and its patrons cared, the sign at the top could have read: “Old Stuff.”
Perhaps booksellers who neglect the classics are merely responding to market demands. Who wants to read those old white guys, anyway? Maybe no one does for now, but booksellers should still put their time and resources towards presenting their customers the greatest literature of the Western world.
Recently, the historically black college Howard University dissolved its classics department as part of “prioritization efforts” at the college. But as Harvard professor of Philosophy Cornel West and CEO of the Classic Learning Test Jeremy Tate said in an op-ed for the Washington Post, “Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture.”
In fact, as the op-ed pointed out, many black civil rights leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. have praised and benefited from reading the classics. Indeed, reading and studying the classics is, “How we become our full selves, spiritually free and morally great,” West and Tate write.
The classics are classics for a reason. Western society didn’t randomly decide that certain people, in certain periods, would write the books students would begrudgingly skim for lit class centuries later. The classic books — whether from the classical period itself (“The Odyssey”) or written centuries later (“Oliver Twist,” “Huckleberry Finn”) — say something about humanity itself.
Who hasn’t felt the irresistible call of the “siren song” and thanked his foresight in removing the means to act on that temptation, as Ulysses did? Who hasn’t witnessed the complete failure of government-run charity to actually alleviate poverty? “Oliver Twist” explores the implications of such failure through the life’s story of a young boy living in an infamous London poorhouse.
In “Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain exposes the lies of the racist, slave-holding South by viewing it through the lens of a young boy viewing the hypocrisy for what it is. Sometimes the renewing force of youth exposes the moral decay of “civilization.”
The classic books deal with problems that exist no matter the historical circumstances — feelings of alienation, greed, the inevitability of evil and death, and the imperative of goodness and eternal life. No iPhone can take that away.
The eternal human lessons discussed in the classics are why those books last. On Medium.com, Spencer Baum writes about the importance of reading classic literature. Focusing on the timeless lessons of “Moby-Dick,” Baum puts it well: “After you’ve read ‘Moby-Dick’, if you took the time to truly grapple with it, you’ll start to recognize Ahab whenever he shows up in your own life.”
Ahab is the wounded man who seeks vengeance against the inanimate forces of nature by succumbing to the fatal promise to “be as gods,” a promise that hearkens to the opening chapters of the biblical book of Genesis.
The layout of the bookstore was telling. In barely five years, all of the books displayed in places of prominence will become irrelevant. The next book about being a #girlboss or “The Lord of the Rings” fanfiction will take its place. As Shakespeare himself would say, the popular but transient books will be “hoisted on their own petard.”
When I spoke about this phenomenon with another friend some weeks later, he mentioned a book published in 1970 — “The Greening of America” by Charles Reich — that was massively popular when it came out. I had never heard of it. Indeed, when the author died two years ago obituaries had to remind readers who he was, and why, at one point, his book was important.
Ultimately, it’s not that such books don’t serve a purpose and aren’t even important to write and read, it’s that they almost always don’t warrant the disproportionate attention they receive upon release in comparison to the classics.
The classics will last. Few read “The Greening of America” anymore, but — despite the best efforts of the cancelers — we will continue to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” for decades, even centuries, to come. True, some schools have removed the book from study for supposedly depicting Atticus Finch as a “white savior.” But “To Kill a Mockingbird” is so much deeper than the cancelers make it out to be.
Among other things, “To Kill a Mockingbird” explores the striking contrast between innocence and evil, as Scout confronts the harsh realities of racism in the adult world as a young child. “To Kill a Mockingbird” answers the question: How can one choose to be good in a world where evil runs amok?
Maybe once the truly permanent nature of the classics is revealed, Barnes and Noble, along with our public consciousness, will again give the classics the place of prominence they deserve. To quote the now canceled Rudyard Kipling, “The gods of the copybook headings will with terror and slaughter return.”
In the recent Netflix film “Moxie,” a teenage feminist questions why “The Great Gatsby” was assigned for summer reading. “Why are we still reading this book?” she asks. “It’s written by some rich white guy, about some rich white guy.” How simplistic.
Perhaps if she had removed her feminist reading lens, this young radical would have found something worth remembering in Fitzgerald’s book. More than a story of a man “obsessed with the only girl he can’t have,” as the student summed it up, “The Great Gatsby” explores the implications of a life lived for pleasure, the promises and failures of the American dream, and the empty refinement of social stratification.
Indeed, if the activist of “Moxie” wants social revolution out of her novels, she should read the following passage from “Gatsby”:
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
There’s only one appropriate word for that quote: Classic.
Updated and expanded from an article that originally appeared in the Hillsdale Collegian.
Get Real!! Our country is FULL of IDIOTS who don’t want to be smart or learned!!
There were great works of Roman time that we no longer know. Grat works of the 17th century gone forever.
It happens.
“A mind like that is hard ground to plow.”
They plow under, just like the rest.
Those in power today seek to eliminate all vestiges of western art and philosophy. For some reason thy want to eradicate 3,000 years of culture.
Personally, I think it’s not so much they have to tear down that which is so they can build something new, it’s far more base.
It’s animus bred in jealousy and shame.
Those minds don’t change. Ever.
In order to preserve this greatest human accomplishment known as Western Civilization we have to eliminate those determined to destroy it.
If it’s worth dying for, it’s most certainly worth killing for.
Old School is the Best School..................
And “It Can’t Happen Here”, Sinclair Lewis....................
As I say, the inexorable lowering of standards everywhere is a manifestation of the decadence of Western Civilisation.
Those who have allowed themselves to succumb to the decadence are fools.
Some of these fools think that theirs is a "new morality" and a "higher truth", though they are in reality merely immorality and untruth.
Note tagline, and observe: today's circumambient society is one of immorality and untruth. Truth for its own sake is held in contempt. Today's "new morality" reflects this.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
You could substitute Bill and Hillary or George and Laura or any number of couples in the elite class in here and it would be both so true and yet these couples wouldn’t recognize themselves if it was stuck under their noise.
I wish the banned Beowulf before I was forced to read it. I hated that book more then any other.
The moral decay of America has been amply exposed already; however no civilisation has ever needed moral restoration more than the USA does today, for America's moral decay is a cancer which, if not extirpated, will destroy America forever.
So overwhelmed by the decadence is the US population, that half of the American People are completely blind to the moral decay that is ubiquitous, relentless, soul sickening, all around them and right before their eyes. Honest, benevolent, profoundly moral people can only gasp in horror!
It was/is a little hard to read Dickens - for me - because he was such a master at the art of dialect. I think of Dickens as the English Mark Twain.
Yes! So true! I see mad Ahab every day--especially in "the news"!
This quotation from Moby Dick (one of my ABSOLUTELY FAVORITE BOOKS EVER!) is one of my favourites--mad Ahab baptising the harpoon with which he intends to kill the whale:
And this:
“not only is the sea such a foe to man who is an alien to it, but it is also a fiend to its own offspring; worse than the Persian host who murdered his own guests; sparing not the creatures which itself hath spawned. Like a savage tigress that tossing in the jungle overlays her own cubs, so the sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe.I see Melville's observations and his warnings every day. The woke generation is wilfully blind! Nothing incites hatred like truth threatening delusion, and half of America--the Democrat Party, establishment Republicans, so called "journalists", academicians, all who have allowed themselves to succumb to the decadence of Western Civilisation are as blind as Oedipus and as deluded as Ahab.“Consider the subtleness of the sea; how its most dreaded creatures glide under water, unapparent for the most part, and treacherously hidden beneath the loveliest tints of azure. Consider also the devilish brilliance and beauty of many of its most remorseless tribes, as the dainty embellished shape of many species of sharks. Consider, once more, the universal cannibalism of the sea; all whose creatures prey upon each other, carrying on eternal war since the world began.
“Consider all this; and then turn to this green, gentle, and most docile earth; consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!”
Moby Dick
Chapter 58, “Brit,” p 298-299.
Our descendants--if they survive it--will be cleaning up the mess made by today's me-first, woke generation for a long time.
Read it? We are living in it!
That writing is so good. It would be easy to replace “Tom and Daisy” with “Democrats”, and it would make perfect sense today, last century, and future years.
>> we found the classics “section” — a barely 10-foot-wide corner where “Hamlet” was shoved up beside “The Catcher in the Rye” in an uneven pile. For all that the store owners and its patrons cared, the sign at the top could have read: “Old Stuff.”
book report assignments/public domain titles
The loss of the library of Alexandria is greatly to be lamented. But in the last 150 years bits and pieces of lost Greek literature have been recovered on papyrus and even though those papyri were not found in Alexandria, the copies found elsewhere in Egypt may have been copied from an exemplar at the library of Alexandria.
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