Recent discourse has it that kids these days, even at elite colleges, don't read books anymore. They used to read one novel a week for a single course in English literature. Now they struggle to read a novel in the course of a whole semester, relying on AI summaries and cliff notes instead. Some students came to university having read only short stories and excerpts.
Loved this! A good complement to your thoughts on fiction would be Le Guin’s short essay Some Thoughts on Narrative from 1980. I think you’ll enjoy it.
This is one of my favourite books, and its great philosophical seriousness to me lies with the fact that Arrowby takes himself and his adventures so very seriously.
*We* might be able to see how silly he is, in his desperate need to hold the centre in all surrounding stories (a theatre-director to the last!), but in some ways he remains at the end incapable of letting go of the belief that something momentous is always happening in his world. He might have set down one grand "plot" by the end, but his plotting nature remains. He will never truly see himself as we see him - just as we too are often caught fast by our own "plot armour" in life, unable to see how silly our own, relentless holding-of-the-centre also is.
Anyway, that to me makes this book an excellent pairing for your musing on literary types who, like Arrowby, act like those around them need to be "saved" from their mediocre (less literate) lives. There's an excellent argument to be made (and which is being made, by many) that we would do better to engage curiously with how the activity of "culture" is being enacted by this generation; and also, those of us who studied literary history know full well that today's moral panic has its own long history, too. How annoyed Nietzsche was with students who read pedestrian news rags instead of the Classics!
An education in the humanities can sometimes make silly theatre directors of us all: an insufferable demographic, really, when the sea of life rolls on, and we’re not ready for its indifference to us.
I have been going through the same thing with fiction reading for several years. It's a serious affliction. I hope I can get back before I die and will take your advice into consideration (no Hardy, *especially* Tess). Iris Murdoch is a wonderful writer, if memory serves, and there are bunches of novels by her I haven't read, in addition to ones I should reread. Your discovery that she is a comedian is also especially important in the way it applies to her philosophy professor Ludwig Wittgenstein.
I read this after writing this and you've given words to a similar feeling I've been having. But I'm an amateur idiot. This was a wonderful and marvellous post. I loved it.
I still do and always have loved going into the world of a book. (Except when my kids were young and I was sleep-deprived.) I also love when I forget a really great book and get to read it again.
Loved this! A good complement to your thoughts on fiction would be Le Guin’s short essay Some Thoughts on Narrative from 1980. I think you’ll enjoy it.
Wonderful reflections, Helen. The Sea, the Sea is one of my favorites. That reminds me that I’ve been wanting to read more of Murdoch’s fiction.
But, you are. ✌🏾
This is one of my favourite books, and its great philosophical seriousness to me lies with the fact that Arrowby takes himself and his adventures so very seriously.
*We* might be able to see how silly he is, in his desperate need to hold the centre in all surrounding stories (a theatre-director to the last!), but in some ways he remains at the end incapable of letting go of the belief that something momentous is always happening in his world. He might have set down one grand "plot" by the end, but his plotting nature remains. He will never truly see himself as we see him - just as we too are often caught fast by our own "plot armour" in life, unable to see how silly our own, relentless holding-of-the-centre also is.
Anyway, that to me makes this book an excellent pairing for your musing on literary types who, like Arrowby, act like those around them need to be "saved" from their mediocre (less literate) lives. There's an excellent argument to be made (and which is being made, by many) that we would do better to engage curiously with how the activity of "culture" is being enacted by this generation; and also, those of us who studied literary history know full well that today's moral panic has its own long history, too. How annoyed Nietzsche was with students who read pedestrian news rags instead of the Classics!
An education in the humanities can sometimes make silly theatre directors of us all: an insufferable demographic, really, when the sea of life rolls on, and we’re not ready for its indifference to us.
I have some related thoughts here. Too many things to read, not enough time,
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/the-death-of-the-book-again
I have been going through the same thing with fiction reading for several years. It's a serious affliction. I hope I can get back before I die and will take your advice into consideration (no Hardy, *especially* Tess). Iris Murdoch is a wonderful writer, if memory serves, and there are bunches of novels by her I haven't read, in addition to ones I should reread. Your discovery that she is a comedian is also especially important in the way it applies to her philosophy professor Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Good luck! It's tough but rewarding. I haven't read any other Murdochs--excited for more!
Iris always looks brilliant in her photos.
I read this after writing this and you've given words to a similar feeling I've been having. But I'm an amateur idiot. This was a wonderful and marvellous post. I loved it.
https://open.substack.com/pub/bhuvan/p/are-you-really-okay-being-this-incurious?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1eft5
I still do and always have loved going into the world of a book. (Except when my kids were young and I was sleep-deprived.) I also love when I forget a really great book and get to read it again.