Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Palin's Second Book and Chopin's 200th
When I told my rather simple, born in a small Ukranian village grandmother the story of Proust who in mid-life shut himself away in a room to write a book for the rest of his life and rarely emerged from its confines, she - while not being truly aware of the magnitude of the achievement but nonetheless impressed and full of reverance mingled with awe not due to snobbery, but from a deep-rooted human instinct for admiration of great deeds (in the same way she admired Chopin) - said something to the effect: "Imagine sacrificing oneself like that and WRITING A BOOK...". And then I think of the present day where anyone who does anything notorious, be it stupid, trivial or even criminal, writes (or rather has it written for them) a best-seller. And I reflect on how the intrinsic value of a book must have fallen greatly over time in the subconscious of the mainstream society due to the overexploitation of this last bastion of the written word's prestige.
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Blame, alas, the printing press an its descendants. First access to the word was democratized then the word itself... In India, important words were not written down exactly for that reason... This had it pluses and its minus. Knowledge held too tightly ossifies, but knowledge gripped too loosely lets the diamonds slip into the dust... bb
ReplyDeleteOf course you're right, and how much better off we are with the easier access to art and knowledge. Was just another small rant ;) But very nicely put BB, and what a poetic idea it is: not writing down something important, and a powerful one too I think - being the opposite of how we think today.
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