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I’m afraid that my recent transient Facebook post about the wildly shifting reputation of once-celebrated writers got me to thinking about how, except for a handful of the genuinely great (who come from all walks of life and genres and are not at all the same thing as “the elite”), most intellectuals and creatives deserve to be remembered for perhaps five per cent of their production, and frequently much less of it than that. The problem is that there comes a time when they are not even remembered for that, and their reputations have to be re-evaluated and sometimes outright rescued, for the sake of that utterly wonderful five or four or one-tenth of one per cent that constitutes their contribution to the world’s cultural inheritance.
This happens to a good many public figures in their own lifetimes, as I have been thinking while trying to do inventory reduction on my ridiculously oversized library. Only the ones who struggle assiduously to stay relevant to their current decade really manage to have their other, usually better work properly assessed, and sometimes even that is not enough, as I have been thinking as I realize anew that it has been a full year now, and I still have not been able to extract and celebrate the really wonderful parts of Nathaniel Tarn’s strangely constructed, sometimes compelling memoir, “Atlantis, An Autoanthropology,” because Nathaniel Tarn is one of those many, many out-of-the-mainstream writers whose diverse accomplishments are so idiosyncratic that it is hard to explain to the previously uninterested why anyone living in the maelstrom of 2023 should stop to consider their oeuvre in the first place. This is why I love the idiosyncratic writers of whom I can say, “Here. You have to read this one. Don’t start anyplace else with their work.”
If I were writing this for Summations, I’d go on citing cases, but I’d rather not. There is something depressing about encountering forgotten examples of the moments when the people one admires were having an off-day or off-decade. And anyway, I have to go back to writing the March iteration of Cullum’s Notebook.
I had thought that I should maybe offset the bleakness of this with a delectable, preferably lyrically fragile photograph, but there seems to be no way to upload the one I had intended.
What came into my mind just now was the absurdly excessive aphorism “Only beauty will save the world,” from Dostoevsky (talk about someone who…no, let’s not go there, “there” being somewhere I would rather not revisit right now). Although I don’t believe my modification of the maxim, either, what comes to mind as an alternative proposition is: Only beauty will justify the world. And even then there are lots of other things that will justify it, for mutually exclusive reasons that reveal more about the psychology of the person writing the aphorism than about the relative or absolute truths of the planet.
This happens to a good many public figures in their own lifetimes, as I have been thinking while trying to do inventory reduction on my ridiculously oversized library. Only the ones who struggle assiduously to stay relevant to their current decade really manage to have their other, usually better work properly assessed, and sometimes even that is not enough, as I have been thinking as I realize anew that it has been a full year now, and I still have not been able to extract and celebrate the really wonderful parts of Nathaniel Tarn’s strangely constructed, sometimes compelling memoir, “Atlantis, An Autoanthropology,” because Nathaniel Tarn is one of those many, many out-of-the-mainstream writers whose diverse accomplishments are so idiosyncratic that it is hard to explain to the previously uninterested why anyone living in the maelstrom of 2023 should stop to consider their oeuvre in the first place. This is why I love the idiosyncratic writers of whom I can say, “Here. You have to read this one. Don’t start anyplace else with their work.”
If I were writing this for Summations, I’d go on citing cases, but I’d rather not. There is something depressing about encountering forgotten examples of the moments when the people one admires were having an off-day or off-decade. And anyway, I have to go back to writing the March iteration of Cullum’s Notebook.
I had thought that I should maybe offset the bleakness of this with a delectable, preferably lyrically fragile photograph, but there seems to be no way to upload the one I had intended.
What came into my mind just now was the absurdly excessive aphorism “Only beauty will save the world,” from Dostoevsky (talk about someone who…no, let’s not go there, “there” being somewhere I would rather not revisit right now). Although I don’t believe my modification of the maxim, either, what comes to mind as an alternative proposition is: Only beauty will justify the world. And even then there are lots of other things that will justify it, for mutually exclusive reasons that reveal more about the psychology of the person writing the aphorism than about the relative or absolute truths of the planet.
