Digital Barbarism by Mark Helprin (best reads of all time .txt) 📕

grapes? Should aboriginal art be “open access” so it can be more accessible to decorators in Southampton and Mayfair? How can they possibly cleave to such an opinion? I can think of only three explanations.

First, as the twenty-first-century equivalents of luftmenschen and café revolutionaries, they are capable of elevating a theory, notion, idea, or dogma above reason, fact, practicality, and experience. Given that they are able to do this even at the cost of their own destruction, when their own interests are unaffected or advanced it becomes especially easy. Fixed on the idea that the good of the people would be served by a White Sea Canal, Stalin ordered its construction, and was apparently forever undisturbed by the corpses of tens of thousands of its laborers buried unmarked on its bottom and in its banks.25 The power of ideas is not to be underestimated.

Second, as evidenced by their own testimony in their blogs and plaints, many of these people have tried their hand at writing and are perfectly content to be paid a pittance or nothing at all, and think therefore that this should be a universal condition. Were it the universal condition, everyone who wrote would be supported, like them, by a salary from some other source. The art of letters would exit even further the realm of professionalism, and thus no writer would be able to say, like Newton explaining his miraculous work on the laws of motion and the calculus, “I thought of nothing else.” And in addition to being relieved of the risk and robbed of the concentration usually associated with great works, writers would be subject to the judgment, discipline, suggestion, restraint, influence, and possibly the command of committees, boards, administrations, and overseers. This would rob them of the freedom and independence they require above all, while at the same time it nourished the mediocrity attendant to bureaucratization of every type.

And third is that which dares not speak its own name—envy. Even as a child, I was intoxicated by the greatness of the written word, and took refuge in its power as the gift and protection of God. Like music, it is a direct route to the truths that lie beyond understanding, taking those who will follow to a height from which it is possible to see something too bright to comprehend. This attitude and belief has been preserved among the Jews since the invention of writing and the advent of revelation. It is so deeply ingrained in Jewish culture and nationality—apart from religion, where it is certainly not absent—that I am controlled by it atavistically and thus can never be a modern man. When I chose my profession, which I was sure would keep me poor all my life, I did so not because I wanted to copy the existence of Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or Nabokov, but because I was compelled to follow the lead of the people from which I am descended, in the most rewarding and satisfying exercise I can imagine: something that, when done with great effort and an honest heart, touches upon the holy; that, even in the face of death and destruction, offers warmth, comfort, promise, and a shield.

As such, it so far exceeds envy as to preclude it absolutely. Although as I age I find that my capacity for envy has diminished almost entirely, I cannot pretend always to have been without it anymore than a mirror in Tom Cruise’s house can claim not to suffer from exhaustion. But it was never able to exist in the light of great writing, which should engender in even the most threatened soul only love and admiration. A beautiful paragraph, like a prayer or a song, should cleanse any opportunistic vice, even if only momentarily, and a great work should lodge in the heart to give strength and equanimity forever.

And yet I discovered in my naïveté as a student and teacher of literature in more universities than any human being should experience, a persistent undertone of malice and envy vis-à-vis the great works and great writers that literary scholars exist—or so I thought—to uphold. Even before the open hostility of contemporary criticism, deep anger and envy manifested themselves in a variety of ways. I was astounded by the surprisingly common claim that literary criticism is at least equal to the works it exists to illuminate. Logically, how could it be? After reading for years in both, I judged the chances of this to be as likely as a seahorse winning the Kentucky Derby.

Nonetheless, I have, from obligation and assignment, read quite a lot of literary criticism, although given my memory of it I could never prove this. An impression lingers, however, which is that no matter how virtuous or brilliant (or even necessary) it may be, it does not and cannot—except when it is literature itself—transcend the limitations of the anatomical atlas that illuminates one system per drawing; tracing, say, the course of the lymph through its net of vessels and nodes. There are many schools of literary criticism. They come and they go, supplanting each other like the generations of man. None has ever been triumphant, because none can be complete, as is a literary work no matter its deficiencies. Just as an anatomical drawing is a view from one perspective only, and keeps in darkness the fullness of the rest of the body, the complexity of its arrangement, the interrelatedness of its astonishingly choreographed systems, its very life, and the reason for its being—all of which yet can be sensed and apprehended in a glance, a touch, or a kiss—so is literary criticism inadequate to the life of a literary work due to its unavoidable failure to see it in full.

On the other hand, literary criticism, when informed and (as must be said these days especially) sane, can deepen understanding of a work immeasurably. In the case of literature that is ancient, out of or skew to fashion, from an alien culture west of Riverside Drive, or obscure