Despite the fact that it would be better for me to be somewhere else, doing something else, I am going to indulge myself in a further meditation on my previous post.
I don’t really recall how I became interested in a life of the mind, in “thought work”, as I have come to call it, but I remember a few things.
One was Thoreau’s “On Walden Pond”. That book moved and surprised me in ways I didn’t expect. It really changed my life.
Another was an English teacher. Hell, I will give you the name: Mike Heller. He fostered in me intellectual curiosity and a love for good literature.
And a third was my friend Richard, who as I have mentioned seems to have gone on to lead the team that developed the iPhone under the more or less direct supervision of Steve Jobs himself.
Richard was always reading things like “The Canterbury Tales”, or Madame Bovary, or Gibbon. That sort of thing. That impressed me.
Back then, all that went with listening to NPR and being a Democrat. Democrats were the ones defending REAL culture from the savages on the Reagan Right, who wanted only religion, who were secretly–without admitting it–working for a theocracy, and the marginalization of all good literature, which was to be burned, one assumed, in a Bradburyan fire by conservatives. The “fire” trucks in Fahrenheit 451 were run by Reaganites. The woods where everyone wandered reciting their rescued books: all Democrats. All Liberals, happy in their learning, happy in their culture, happy to live in well chosen words composed in noble and noteworthy stories.
How things have changed!!! What DOES someone who is “well read” read nowadays? The Dead White Men are passe and politically incorrect. But what is left of quality? Almost nothing. Almost nothing. The classics are classics for a reason. You can’t generate great literature easily, and it doesn’t happen often.
So who defends good books? Nobody, as far as I can tell. Nobody even reads any more, left or right.
I have reached out to Richard on a couple of occasions asking him if he thinks human culture has benefited or lost from his invention, but he has not responded. I was drunk the last time I corresponded with him, so that no doubt did not help.
But where can we find grounding? Church and religion are about all that is left and not daily negotiable. The “culture” of books and plays and older movies IS negotiable. What you love today may be Verboten tomorrow, and you have to be prepared for this emotionally by not holding anything sacred, or being too attached to anything, or even anyone.
Where, in our world, can sober, serious, erudite and OPEN people sit together and say intelligent things together? If you find such a place–even on the internet–let me know. What I see is manias, fear, derision, closed-ness (of the sort Bloom described, in a book you are not supposed to read), and an hauteur originating solely from perfect conformity.