Things Old People Say

Things Old People Say

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Originally shared by ****

We are doomed by a culture of mass idiocy, says Mario Vargas Llosa: http://btyw.info/1fp6hAA
http://btyw.info/1fp6hAA

Comments

  1. G.K. NelsonAugust 19, 2015 at 9:10 AM

    This is a brilliant book. The reviewer is spot-on, but more importantly I believe Vargas Llosa is too. Others will likely call him a hand-wringing Cassandra in defense of their own facile understanding of what passes for contemporary culture, but it's hard to argue with one of the world's foremost intellects when he's at his pondering best.

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  2. Rick Wayne (Author)August 19, 2015 at 9:14 AM

    Plato was also one of the world's foremost intellects. As was Cicero. And the Marquis de Condorcet. Every one of them was certain that the next generation marked the closing of the intellectual history of man.

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  3. Drew McCarthyAugust 19, 2015 at 9:23 AM

    Criticism, as an exercise in discernment and analysis, is almost always useful, and frequently entertaining to a curmudgeon like myself.
    But. If one fails to find the hope and wonder of the world we live in, and the future we're constantly moving towards, one is probably guilty of unbalanced judgement.

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  4. Drew McCarthyAugust 19, 2015 at 9:25 AM

    It's also possible that Plato, Cicero, et. al. were not wrong, given their expectations.

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  5. Rick Wayne (Author)August 19, 2015 at 10:06 AM

    And yet, mankind continues to scale to new heights.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Drew McCarthyAugust 19, 2015 at 10:14 AM

    And, plumb new depths.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Rick Wayne (Author)August 19, 2015 at 10:18 AM

    When Peter the Great discovered his wife's infidelity, he forced her to watch her lover being beheaded, then kept the man's head pickled in a jar on the mantle of their bedroom as a constant reminder.

    New depths indeed.

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  8. Peter StrempelAugust 19, 2015 at 1:50 PM

    Intuitively I’m likely to side with Vargas Llosa.  I have some time yet, but I feel the power of aged curmudgeonry displace within me the naïve idealism I once felt as strongly as the hormonal vitality that spurs a young man on to pursue women best left alone.

    In looking through the critical notices, though, I was most taken by the New York Times’s Joshua Cohen.  Given I have not read the essays, I suppose I like Cohen’s review for the writerliness of it, and because of his obvious sympathy for the man, which did not reduce him to uncritical commonplaces.

    One line in particular strikes me as resonant: ‘To complain about the death of culture is to complain about dying yourself. It’s a displacement of mortality.’  I wonder sometimes whether this is my own impetus to decry Millennial cretinism and see an effluent drowned culture rather a change in pace and direction.

    Nevertheless, I have always thought it worth the time and suspension of ceaselessness to sit and listen to old men tell tales so strange you have to wonder whether the past was an alien territory, or the storyteller an elaborate fabricator.  Like reading the Bible, though, the value isn’t in any literal absorption, but lies in the cadences and sentiments that permeate the stories themselves.

    It’s a real shame I don’t read Spanish.  I should like to compare this book to Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality.

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