Books that have become classics--books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal--always remind me of retired c...olonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What is literary tradition? What is a classic? What is a canonical view of tradition? How are canons of accepted classics formed, ...and how are they unformed? I think that all these quite traditional questions can take one simplistic but still dialectical question as their summing up: do we choose tradition or does it choose us, and why is it necessary that a choosing take place, or a being chosen? What happens if one tries to write, or to teach, or to think, or even to read without the sense of a tradition? Why, nothing at all happens, just nothing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted b...y audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator's lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
How to attain sufficient clarity of thought to meet the terrifying issues now facing us, before it is too late, is ... important. ...Of one thing I feel reasonably sure: we can't stop to discuss whether the table has or hasn't legs when the house is burning down over our heads. Nor do the classics per se seem to furnish the kind of education which fits people to cope with a fast-changing civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a difference between dramatizing your sensibility and your personality. The literary works which we think of as classics ...did the former. Much modern writing does the latter, and so has an affinity with, say, night-club acts in all their shoddy immediacy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Out of the darkness where Philomela sat, Her fairy numbers issued. What then ailed me?... My ears are called capacious but they failed me, Her classics registered a little flat! I rose, and venomously spat.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This youngest of the arts is also the most heavily burdened with memory. Cinema is a time machine. Movies preserve the past, while... theatres--no matter how devoted to the classics, to old plays--can only "modernize." Movies resurrect the beautiful dead; present, intact, vanished or ruined environments; embody without irony styles and fashions that seem funny today.... Films age (being objects) as no theatre event does (being always new).LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »