As solitary as an oyster

I have often joked to anyone within earshot that I have an auto-didactic classical education. And then I laugh. As the sentence is unusually dense and really not very funny, nobody else ever laughs. The benefits of a classical education used to mean that you could converse with other learned persons on weighty topics of great import. But since no one cares about weighty topics of great import, you're left to make jokes about Blake that no one will ever find funny. And to be fair, I can completely understand why. Acting like a pompous git is never very well liked. But what is it that has caused the decline of classical studies? The phasing out of the study of ancient Greek and Latin no doubt played some part, but the myths and stories of antiquity have been translated into the vernacular for at least two centuries now, and the handy-cap of not reading a text in it's original prose doesn't mean that it's tenants and observations are any less relevant.

Andrea: "Unhappy is the land that breeds no hero."
Galileo: "No, Andrea: Unhappy is the land that needs a hero."

The above is a passage from Brecht's Leben des Galilei. I could make the argument that in this trying time of crisis and universal brouhaha, people have no need of heros, but that simply doesn't match up with historical evidence. In crisis, people like stories of heroes. Today, though, we don't have heroes. We have our celebretatum, for whom we clamour for details of their lives and musical choices, but they are never the sort of people who perform "great deeds". Charitible work not withstanding, our celebrites are not heros of renown, but entertainers: singers, actors, dancers. Bards used to tell the stories of heroes. Now, the focus is on the bards themselves.

I think Rand would have been displeased by teflon.

The true purpose of post-modern literary and artistic criticism is to bring the world to a point where it is impossible to say the phrase "I like potatoes" without it being ironic, symbolic of the Irish Potato Famine, Sisyphus, Anglo-Frisian relations, the cold wa, modern technology, sexual feminist re-interpretive Randian values and the rise of teflon waffle irons; and finally to also be a reference to an amusing anecdote about Oscar Wilde, Bette Midler and/or Ron Paul.

See, literary critics are no better than Hollywood producers. They don't want you to read Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, they want you to read Granville Hicks Presents Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird. They want to remove all of the author's presence from the novel and infuse it with their own self, just like a hermit crab emptying a shell and taking up residence.

Only, you know, different.

In this year of grace.

I brought three books of fiction with me when I came here to Humber. I brought Jonathan Strange because I was re-reading it at the time. I brought my three volumes of Peake's Ghormenghast, because it's passages of faded grandeur appealed to me greatly as an companion in misery. And I brought my well read copy of Harper Lee's To Kill A Mocking Bird. People say it's a book about growing up, but I've always felt it a much more melancholic book then that. Atticus is Quixote, not the deluded Quixote of Cervantes' beginning, a deluded madman who sees giants in flour mills. Atticus is a Quixote of Part Two, a man clinging to honour because no one else will, a man who charges out knowing that he is most likely doomed to failure, but he goes out anyways, because no one else will, because it's his duty to do so.

And he fails. Just like Quixote, Atticus fails. And he fights the best god damned fight he can, we cheer for him, are fueled by the passion of his argument, of his fight. And he fails because it was not possible to succeed.

There's... there's a line from the book. Atticus has lost, and exits the courtroom, and the entire upper balcony rises to mark his going, as a sign of respect, as a sign of gratitude. Reverend Sykes says to young Scout "Miss Jean-Louise, stand up. Your father's passing."

We don't do that anymore. We don't tilt lances with Knights of the White Moon, we don't go for lost causes. We don't stand for those who do. Maybe we never did.

Ior mi,' dixit sollemniter, 'egomet, Winnie ille Pu, caudam tuam reperiam.

With my father re-publishing his older poetry, I have come to the realization that those reading it may read passages that refer to me. Those persons might know me, or know of me. Opinions about me are being formed by the written word at this VERY MOMENT. After the Second World War, Christopher Robin Milne grew to loathe his father and all his works, embittered by his portrayal as a young boy. I have no such feelings of vitriol, but I am left wondering: my childhood is set in print, it should last for eons, given the right conditions. If that is all that is left of my name and house in history, how am I to feel about it?

Isn't it funny
How a bear likes honey?
Quid est causae cur?