[b]Lionel Trilling
Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty.[/b]
Even bad literature. Well, for some.
…we should consider an idea that once was salient in western culture: the idea of “making a life”, by which was meant conceiving human existence, one’s own or another’s, as if it were a work of art upon which one might pass judgment…This desire to fashion, to shape, a self and a life has all but gone from a contemporary culture whose emphasis, paradoxically enough, is so much on self.
Now it’s more akin to “making a buck”. Selflessly if necessary.
We who are liberal and progressive know that the poor are our equals in every sense except that of being equal to us.
Except of course in theory.
At the behest of the criterion of authenticity, much that was once thought to make up the very fabric of culture has come to seem of little account, mere fantasy or ritual, or downright falsification. Conversely, much that culture traditionally condemned and sought to exclude is accorded a considerable moral authority by reason of the authenticity claimed for it, for example, disorder, violence, unreason.
And now look where we are: In the belly of the beast that is Trumpworld.
In the most secret heart of every intellectual … there lies hidden … the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man.
Whatever could have given him that idea.
We live, understandably enough, with the sense of urgency; our clock, like Baudelaire’s, has had the hands removed and bears the legend, “It is later than you think.” But with us it is always a little too late for mind, yet never too late for honest stupidity; always a little too late for understanding, never too late for righteous, bewildered wrath; always too late for thought, never too late for naïve moralizing. We seem to like to condemn our finest but not our worst qualities by pitting them against the exigency of time.
Now there’s a swamp worth draining. Unless of course I’m wrong.