I worry that we’ve lost all momentum.
Previous generations grew up in a general milieu in which people basically knew the Bible, Homer, and Shakespeare, and if they had been exposed to Wordsworth, Byron and Tennyson. An evolving trend in movies and television — what has gone before helps illuminate what is in front of us now.
Exposure to a “new” poet like TS Eliot works, if you have a background to understand the allusions in Eliot. Even an author like Tolkien really works best if the reader understands Good and Evil and idyllic country settings threatened by industrialization and where personal freedom is a precious thing threatened by totalitarianism. There is a context that people once had that serves as a foundation for a great deal of art.
I think it is challenging to pickup a “classic novel” and just appreciate it in isolation. The classics are part of the “great conversation” which has been going on for thousands of years. But we broke the line. There is a generation or two who have grown up in relative silence (or worse: rap music) and I think it will be hard for them to suddenly discover and appreciate classic works. It takes more than focus and effort to read a particular work and enjoy it (that’s relatively easy) but to really see why some of these works are worthwhile, you need to have some background to get into the swing of it, as it were. We have no momentum now. People are starting from basically Zero and I’m not sure how workable that really is.
The comment about “The Great Gatsby” shows this to some extent — it’s a book written by a rich white guy, about a rich white guy. That’s a comment that comes from a vacuous mind. So superficial. A classic novel reduced to identity politics and found wanting simply because it seems to lack diversity. A mind like that is hard ground to plow.
My daughter once told me of a well-degreed academic she knew of who wouldn't read Dickens because his writing was so hard to understand ... he used so many "big" words.
Partly it is vocabulary related. The other day I was reading a Georgette Heyer novel. Not a classic but a book rich in vocabulary. If you can read Christie, Heyer and Sayers or say, Tolkien, Forester and Gray as a pre-teen you will have the vocabulary to read the classics.
But when I was learning to read if I came across a word I did not know I was expected to either figure it out from the context or to look it up in the dictionary. This is no longer the case.
Children are expected to hold up a finger if they do not understand a word and at five the work is considered too difficult for them and they are given something less challenging to read.
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.