Rise and Fall Of Culture?...

rise and fall of culture? …”

Literature tends to overlap with or refract the influence of sex. Many masters, from V. S. Pritchett and T. S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf, Kazuo Ishiguro, and even Charles Dickens, were unfaithful, and in one sense, unfaithful to other women (as in Lionel Trilling’s remarkable essay “The Literary Double Lives of D.H. Lawrence and Francis Carco,” from 1940). As Simon Schama tells us in “Life Without Pity,” the title of his splendid history of literature (1987), there was much more besides:

Throughout Europe and America, new men and women – in short, an entirely new generation, the Radical Generation – sprang up to see that poetry, painting, sculpture, music and the new achievements in science could never be satisfied by a mere progress toward more and more highly developed versions of their predecessors. That change was in them, so they changed the world.

Schama could not have expressed it better than in the book’s very last paragraph:

There are no moral absolutes, and no simple ways of judging what is “good.” Life is truly hard to sort out and still harder to live. No man will ever be able to gather up all the human souls and devise a single rule for every occasion. … So look for what you can rely on and what you can find, and let the rest be just what it is: unknowable.

Are you giving up fiction? In a way, this book is all about fiction and all about questions of morality.

More:

The second thing that happened, long before this book was written, was the appropriation and redescription of a great tradition: literature itself. Today, so much of what is said about literature seems to be quite artificial and inartistic, and I do not mean to turn back the clock. I hope this book will contribute to a renewal of the attention that has to be paid to literature. I try to look on the problem as an economist would. For instance, if you consider a collection of essays as a body of work, you are asking the economists: “What is the net effect of these essays, on the total time spent on thinking about economics?” Some economists would say: “There is no net effect, because the number of papers I publish is a measure of economic progress.” But economists should not talk in those terms. Instead, they should try to come up with a better measure of the time spent thinking about the work. I’m not sure what that better measure should be, but it ought to be a better measure of the human mind as well as of economic progress. In the end, economics does not deal with the only thing in the world. To have a proper idea of human nature, or to have a proper economic policy, you must have a proper conception of human behavior.

Now the central question. It’s okay to admire Nabokov, like me. He is smart and unusual, and, like many great writers, he seems to deserve all the plaudits. It’s also fine to detest him, or even to think his work is stupid and sexist. But I cannot, for the life of me, understand how to move forward from here.

—from ancient Roman to Renaissance—to create a tangible timeline of historical and cultural events. But the First Amendment protects speech that is critical of public officials, and that applies to speeches and other public events, too.

Voters who have paid to hear Mr. Colbert or Mr. Maher express their opinion have a First Amendment right to hear them. There is no Constitutional right to get a ticket to one of these rallies. Yet somehow we are supposed to believe that people who attend these political rallies pay to hear the speeches of the political speakers. Yet this statement is not true. People at political speakers and not the political speakers. In fact, the people who attend political rallies do not seem to care that the people they pay to hear are not the political speakers.

Let us take one last look at the above quote, shall we?

“If you want to make a little money for your business, then you must participate in any government activity that makes your government business profitable.