Saturday, September 01, 2007
Quiz
What book (published in 1957) by what author do these words describe?
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In this respect, the book is like a soap opera that reassures untold millions that the day-to-day flux of their existence is not without significance, or else why would something so closely resembling it be on television?Hat tip: Patrick Kurp.
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A passage such as this, appearing in an alleged literary classic, must encourage and delude many an adolescent keeper of a diary that his entries will one day find the appreciative audience that their immanent genius deserves.
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I don't think my teacher would have let me get away at the age of ten with such a passage in the obligatory essay on what I did on my summer holidays.
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Suffice it to say that this is at some remove from Proust.
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Only someone who had no real interest in people, and wished to disguise the fact by expressing superficially generous sentiment, could write such drivel.
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But while it is true that most great writers were tormented souls, it does not follow that most tormented souls were great writers.
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The fact that his work is now being subjected to near-biblical levels of reverential scholarship is a sign of very debased literary and academic standards.
