I have lately been coming to feel that, as an American, I am more or less in the eighteenth century—or, at any rate, not much later than the early nineteenth. I do not drive a car and rather dislike this form of travel—I have not progressed further than the bicycle. I cannot abide the radio—though I regularly play the phonograph, which gives me, as the radio cannot, exactly what music I want at exactly the moment I want it. I have rarely watched a television program, and I almost never go to the movies (a word that I still detest as I did the first time I heard it)....I make no attempt to keep up with the younger American writers; and I only hope to have the time to get through some of the classics I have never read. Old fogeyism is comfortably closing in.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Sunday, February 28, 2016
Old Fogeyism
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972), A Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956), p. 211: