Subject: Re: bands of brothers
From: L. Manning Vines (lmanningvines@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Jul 06 2002 - 16:04:32 EDT
Cecilia said:
<< Only one in a kabillion achieves
immortality. And that's only immortality in the current
age. As time goes by, even that disappears.
In the end, there's only one to represent it all.
Homer. Shakespeare. Hemingway?
[. . .]
Even a masterpiece goes the way of the rest of it
after enough time passes. >>
If your positioning of Homer, Shakespeare, and possibly Hemingway is meant
to be some sort of timeline, it strikes me as a bafflingly truncated one.
Truncated, indeed, beyond all reasonable hyperbole. Perhaps this is because
I disagree with the very premise you're putting forward.
"So long as men can breath or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this
gives life to thee." Shakespeare knew that he was Shakespeare, and he
apparently had more doubt in the continued existence of reading people than
in the survival of his work contingent upon them. And I don't think that
what he said there was something unique to his sonnets: I think that this is
true of masterpieces generally.
Certainly, the majority today does not seem to read very much, and even less
of very old stuff. But literate people are neither dead nor dying, as you
know; and as you may not know, every town has a Classicist, and every city
has several of them. If what you mean by
the-immortality-that-disappears-after-the-current-age is something like the
screaming adoration had by the Beatles, or even by J.K. Rowling, then I'll
agree with you. But otherwise, I think you're quite wrong. Masterpieces DO
attain a sort of immortality that does NOT end with the current age, and
that seems to be, like Shakespeare suggested, contingent only upon the
continued success of our species.
In your abridged timeline -- if that indeed is what it was -- each of the
three entries becomes shorthand for a great number of Immortals. Aeschylus,
Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates,
Plato, and Aristotle all wrote, lived, and died within a period of 200
years. They do not get the audience today of, say, Harry Potter, or even
J.D. Salinger, but they can be found in paperback in any Barnes & Noble, in
any Library, and even if you've never read them I'm sure the names at least
sound familiar. Surely this speaks of some kind of immortality? I doubt
that Basketball star Shaquile O'Neal (forgive me if I did violence to the
spelling) has often held forth on being, substance, potentiality, and
actuality, but this does not prevent him from calling himself The Big
Aristotle, and the name is familiar and formidable enough to be embraced and
used by fans.
And while not everyone affords for Euripides the variety of wide-eyed
adulation usually reserved for the Beatles or Tom Cruise or Harry Potter or
Holden Caulfield, some people still do, believe it or not. They exist in
every Classics department, most libraries, and often where you least expect
them. Believe me, I know several. I've even been privy to several young
ladies' fantasies concerning men in togas.
Plutarch, Tacitus, and Epictetus were contemporary to each other, and just
about to Ptolemy, Marcus Aurelius, and Galen. Chaucer shortly followed
Dante. Erasmus, Machiavelli, Copernicus, Rabelais, and Calvin lived in the
same years, most of which were also shared by Montaigne and Gilbert; with
Cervantes, Bacon, Galileo, Shakespeare, Kepler and Hobbes arriving and
writing very shortly. Of course Descartes and Milton fit right in there,
with Pascal, Locke, Spinoza, Newton, Swift, Montesquieu, and Voltaire right
on their heels. Austen, Beethoven, and Balzac inhabited Earth
contemporarily, as did, shortly later, Darwin, Dickens, Kierkegaard, and
Melville. Ibsen, Tolstoy, Twain, both William and Henry James, and
Nietzsche lived some of the same years as Freud, Shaw, Conrad, and Chekhov.
And I take THIS to be a greatly abridged timeline of Immortals.
All of these people wrote, and all of them are still read. All of them will
certainly continue to be read, at least by somebody, and will have their
names mentioned in books by other people, well beyond our lifetimes.
Probably well beyond our grandchildren's lifetimes.
We have masterpieces -- and the Immortals who wrote them -- as old as
written language. The didn't go away with the passing years and centuries
and millennia. Some of them began as oral traditions BEFORE writing was
invented. The people who love and cherish these books, who study them
meticulously and as obsessively as any teenaged stalker making a roadtrip to
Cornish, who don't often write fiction because we are too busy reading a
list of masterpieces as long as the written word itself, are an often quiet
but pervasive force in the world. Most of us don't get out much, but we
continue to exist. And so will the masterpieces, no matter how old they
get, so long as we do.
-robbie
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