The Right Idea: An Illuminating Essay

The editors of The New York Times Book Review asked “some notably avid readers — who also happen to be poets, musicians, diplomats, filmmakers, novelists, actors, and artists –” to name the books they read this year. About 50 answered the call, listing what must be several hundred titles. I noticed that not one of them named any books by the Beats. No Kerouac. No Ginsberg. No Burroughs. This, at a time when the literary influence of the most famous Beats reached a highwater mark with the Nobelization of Bob Dylan.

Paul Simon
[Photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick for The NY Times]

But there was also no mention of any books by Hemingway or Faulkner, Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. No Tolstoy. No Balzac. No Flaubert. And what of Shakespeare? Only a single mention — by Harold Bloom, who writes that he rereads “King Lear” “incessantly,” adding with a highfalutin sense of himself as the tragic monarch: “In this bad autumn I echo Lear: ‘We cry that we are come unto this great stage of fools.'” Yes, the Trumpishness of the times demands notice. But I’d say that of all the comments by the chosen luminaries, Paul Simon’s essay — singling out Edward O. Wilson’s Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life as the most powerful book he’d read this year — made the best use of his opportunity to say something important.

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william osborne says

December 25, 2016 at 6:48 am

This NYT article contains 14,135 words written by 47 leading intellectual and cultural figures, but the words “working class” are mentioned only once – by Francis Fukiyama. Would that not seem strange in the year Trump was elected? To put if colorfully, if also in a crude manner, it is a reminder of how far the American intelligentsia has its head up its ass. What kind of country creates economic policies that leave large portions of almost all its cities literally looking like some sort of ghettoized, post-apocalyptic wasteland, while its leading cultural figures read and say almost nothing about that?

Hello! Anybody home! I think your house is on fire.

Well, I guess it’s the same intellectual landscape that didn’t see Trump coming. Surprise, surprise. Through this article, we get a good impression of the American intellectual and their almost pathologically blinkered view of the world.

There is, of course, much to admire about a writer and person like Edward O. Wilson, but personally, I have to wonder about his somewhat precious, rather Harvardish philosophizing about genetics and culture, and about grand schemes to save the planetary environment, when he has so little to say about the human catastrophes surrounding his fellow citizens right there in his own city. How did America’s massive ghettos and urban ruins become so invisible to all these keen sighted intellects?

One of the main problems is our highly classist education system – an unfortunate legacy of the worst side of our British heritage – that gives our intellectuals such a deep sense of entitlement and insularity that the thoughts and concerns of the working class become veiled, impalpable, out of sight and out of mind.

Then comes the tyrant who sees the tinder box he can set aflame. A large part of those 47 people who commented on their reading deserve to have the asses burned in the coming conflagration, but sadly, in the inoculated privilege of our intellectual and cultural world, it’s highly likely that they still won’t see what is happening. And I wonder if they would say anything even if they did.

Comments

william osborne says

December 25, 2016 at 6:48 am

This NYT article contains 14,135 words written by 47 leading intellectual and cultural figures, but the words “working class” are mentioned only once – by Francis Fukiyama. Would that not seem strange in the year Trump was elected? To put if colorfully, if also in a crude manner, it is a reminder of how far the American intelligentsia has its head up its ass. What kind of country creates economic policies that leave large portions of almost all its cities literally looking like some sort of ghettoized, post-apocalyptic wasteland, while its leading cultural figures read and say almost nothing about that?

Hello! Anybody home! I think your house is on fire.

Well, I guess it’s the same intellectual landscape that didn’t see Trump coming. Surprise, surprise. Through this article, we get a good impression of the American intellectual and their almost pathologically blinkered view of the world.

There is, of course, much to admire about a writer and person like Edward O. Wilson, but personally, I have to wonder about his somewhat precious, rather Harvardish philosophizing about genetics and culture, and about grand schemes to save the planetary environment, when he has so little to say about the human catastrophes surrounding his fellow citizens right there in his own city. How did America’s massive ghettos and urban ruins become so invisible to all these keen sighted intellects?

One of the main problems is our highly classist education system – an unfortunate legacy of the worst side of our British heritage – that gives our intellectuals such a deep sense of entitlement and insularity that the thoughts and concerns of the working class become veiled, impalpable, out of sight and out of mind.

Then comes the tyrant who sees the tinder box he can set aflame. A large part of those 47 people who commented on their reading deserve to have the asses burned in the coming conflagration, but sadly, in the inoculated privilege of our intellectual and cultural world, it’s highly likely that they still won’t see what is happening. And I wonder if they would say anything even if they did.
- BobG says
  
  December 25, 2016 at 6:05 pm
  
  Oof!! Right in the solar plexus. Good for you!
  
  I wish I had said it. But I wouldn’t have said it as well. I can quote it though.