'We praise democracy most of the time, but we practice it as if we had accepted every argument against it, as if we believe it must depress the the level of culture and public life.'
'Those who are ignorant of the past are condemned to repeat it, and society does indeed seem to be reverting to a dismal past, which, in our ignorance, we call an inevitable future. But this is true, too: those who are ignorant of history deprive themselves of the hope that they would learn from what is best in it, and are condemned to finding hope in any aspect of a past they can not repeat. Generous hope is embedded in this landscape, and in the national landscape, waiting to be remembered.'
'We would have to persuade the press not to bullyrag any utterance that seems to them too complex for the common mind.'
Future generations will think we were blessed to be alive at the same time as Marilynne Robinson. And so we are.
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Not sure what point is being made here. Why do writers for ever trot out the idea that remembering the past is some guarantee of present value? I have never seen a shred of evidence that this is the case. The past is propaganda. More to the pint why is the current credit crisis not viewed as the Berlin Wall of capitalism? Will we witness the end of faith in Wall Street?
ReplyDeletePOINT - no cheap comments now...
ReplyDeleteShe is not talking about THE past, she is talking about THIS past and you really are missing the point, Chris. The current credit crisis is structurally the same as the dotcom crashj, the Asian crisis, junk bond crisis, the secondary bank collapse... all the way back to Jim Slater and beyond It may well be the end, but it hasn;t been yet.
ReplyDeleteBryan, I have to thank you for pointing Marilynne Robinson out to me. You're right, she is a genius: Ideas that are profound and cogent but, most importantly, beautifully expressed.
ReplyDeleteIt's a mistake to idealise a past, though easy: what we tend to remember is what survived, and what survived is often worthwhile - for example when i think of late 19th C/early 20th C Austria & Germany i think of Mahler, Wittgenstein, Klimt, Mann, etc., but the truth is it was probably 95% hideous poverty and destitution. i don't see this as propaganda, it's just that the Tractatus is still around whereas the slums of Vienna aren't.
ReplyDeleteWas it Cicero who said a man with no knowledge of what preceded his birth is as good as a slave? Why not reach into the past for what seems to hold good now? Not the same as trying to return to some fictional golden age.
An excellent article, by the way.
An excellent article indeed. The fruit of all that study of the 'dismal science', by the way, was Part One of her hard-to-find Mother Country, which focuses on England's historic taste for pauperising most of her population (cf De Tocqueville's Memoir On Pauperism). A quote from Mother Country gives the flavour: 'The history and present condition of ordinary British people make it clear enough how they have been used, and in what spirit, by capitalists and socialists.' She also refers to British health care as 'first among all those killing instances of largesse which are the boast and lament of contemporary Britain'. Killing indeed.
ReplyDeleteForget all that and read "Housekeeping." It's an absolutely brilliant novel. And "Gilead" is on my to-be-read list. Have you already enjoyed it, Bryan?
ReplyDeleteI have, Susan. She has a novel coming out next year called Home which seems to be a parallel narrative to Gilead with some of the same characters
ReplyDeleteMove Gilead to the top of your list, Susan - you won't be sorry.
ReplyDelete