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I find myself writing even more autobiographically self-indulgent pieces than usual, then thinking there must be a salvageable core in there somewhere.
But I remain unsure what it is in the case of the concatenation of associations set off by NYRB Classics' republication of Gilbert Highet's Poets in a Landscape. Essentially, it was a reflection on the difficulty of re-inventing the Greeks and Romans in every generation, and of being certain that one is doing it right because one has to unremember all the aspects of one's own experience that have lost all relevance. If one doesn't read Tibullus or Horace oneself these days, would Highet's 1957 contextualization of them in their physical environment, with "crisp modern translations," appeal to anyone who wasn't of the generation and social class charmed by, say, Peter Mayle or by Eat, Pray, Love? Anne Carson's An Oresteia is an effort to make the classics new; but is that enough? Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius" succeeded in the early twentieth century because it was putting a new spin on a body of knowledge that had been drummed into every reader's head; today we are starting at most from popularizations even more strangely distorted than the Cecil B. DeMille epics of fifty years ago.
This reflection went on to asides about how Augustine ought to be taught as producing "the birth of skeptical inwardness" instead of the standard City-of-Man[sic]-City-of-God. There was a great deal of nonsense otherwise.
I cited my standard line from Derek Walcott's "Sea Grapes," "The classics can console. But not enough." Such were the fruits of "a sound colonial education" in the early part of the fundamental transformation that really got rolling circa 1960.
But I remain unsure what it is in the case of the concatenation of associations set off by NYRB Classics' republication of Gilbert Highet's Poets in a Landscape. Essentially, it was a reflection on the difficulty of re-inventing the Greeks and Romans in every generation, and of being certain that one is doing it right because one has to unremember all the aspects of one's own experience that have lost all relevance. If one doesn't read Tibullus or Horace oneself these days, would Highet's 1957 contextualization of them in their physical environment, with "crisp modern translations," appeal to anyone who wasn't of the generation and social class charmed by, say, Peter Mayle or by Eat, Pray, Love? Anne Carson's An Oresteia is an effort to make the classics new; but is that enough? Pound's "Homage to Sextus Propertius" succeeded in the early twentieth century because it was putting a new spin on a body of knowledge that had been drummed into every reader's head; today we are starting at most from popularizations even more strangely distorted than the Cecil B. DeMille epics of fifty years ago.
This reflection went on to asides about how Augustine ought to be taught as producing "the birth of skeptical inwardness" instead of the standard City-of-Man[sic]-City-of-God. There was a great deal of nonsense otherwise.
I cited my standard line from Derek Walcott's "Sea Grapes," "The classics can console. But not enough." Such were the fruits of "a sound colonial education" in the early part of the fundamental transformation that really got rolling circa 1960.
