Lately, I’ve noticed that modern
culture has lost its relationship with its roots. More and more, it seems to me
that my society doesn’t cherish the thoughts of the men and women who came
before them. In the consumerist, self-centered society that is modern America,
is literature being left behind?
Today, in my “Geography of California”
class, my professor played a video from his vault that explained the
environmental impact of the channelization of the Los Angeles River. What
struck me most about the old video was not the touching shots of native birds
nesting under man-made bridges, or the dramatic pull-away camera tricks that
caught the LA skyline behind a haze of fog as the sun set behind the edge of
the concrete waterway; it was that during one of the many cheesy scenes of a
man talking in front of a green screen, the decision to pave the river was described
as a “Faustian bargain.”
Now, I hate to sound pretentious,
but I’m pretty sure that the other students – mostly freshman – in that general
education class had no idea what the speaker meant by “Faustian.” Hell, I didn’t
even learn about Faust until my Senior Symposium class that I took this last winter,
and that was after already reading many times more than the average engineer. In
the case of this old video about the LA River, I’m afraid the reference to
literature was lost because our society simply doesn’t care anymore.
Let me jump back a few days. I was
standing in line at the Poly Fresh, a convenience store on campus, balancing a
book, Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness
of Being, on my head (it’s just what I do), when an older man in line
behind me asked what class I was reading such a great book for. While we waited
in line together we talked about the novel and about his position as a music
professor who loves literature. At the end of our little talk, as I was
approaching the register, he nodded his head and asked, “Muss es sein?” (Must
it be?). To which, I responded, “Es muss sein!” (It must be!). It isn’t
surprising that we got quite a few confused stares from the eavesdropping
customers in line with us.
Again, the apathy towards
literature became hauntingly apparent to me. The people in the store looked at
us as if we were crazy men, spouting off nonsense – and, in a society that
doesn’t embrace literature as a bridge for the emotions of individuals to
interact with one another, perhaps we were.
It’s almost sad to compare
ourselves to the Greeks. Likely, for a Greek man living at the peak of his civilization’s
success, it would have been difficult to go a day without experiencing what we
now have come to call the Classics; perhaps in Athens a man couldn’t walk
through the center of his city-state without running into a relief of Athena,
or Poseidon, or some other deity, and, most likely, he could not go the day
without hearing of some reference to great Greek literature. The stories of his
people surrounded him, and they connected him to his fellow man. Every man
could relate to his neighbor through the myths that they were both raised on,
and society built upon itself in this way.
Today, the closest thing I’d say we
have to the relationship that the people of Greece had with their art and
culture is our relationship with Superhero comics. Our society doesn’t seem to
care about literature anymore, and our myths are now our movies.
Tonight’s blog post is a pretty short
one. I simply wanted to point out my concerns and tell a few stories from my
past week on campus. So, what do you think? Will our society ever fully lose its
sense of art and culture? And will “The Avengers” be a great work of art that
is regularly referenced a thousand years from now?
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