Saturday, May 12, 2012

Dated

Related to my observation that the positions of liberals and conservatives have changed over time, I ran across this Thomas Pynchon essay from 1984.  It wanders - not the level of clarity one expects from the NYT Review - and several things Pynchon states emphatically turned out to be not so.  Interesting for what it is, a period piece, reflecting how NYT readers thought at the time.

I had commented on CP Snow's Two Cultures before.  Of most interest for quick thought is Snow's later modification that it was now Three Cultures, as the social sciences occupied a range not necessarily knowledgeable about either science nor art and literature.

1 comment:

james said...

"His education had been neither scientific nor classical—merely "Modern." The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. He was a man of straw, a glib examinee in subjects that require no exact knowledge (he had always done well on Essays and General Papers) and the first hint of a real threat to his bodily life knocked him sprawling."
― C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength