Finally I'm reading The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. He's certainly making the rounds on my blog, and he'll probably keep doing so for awhile yet.
It reminded me of a question in my mind, one that's been here ever since I was a child. I was raised rather a bit in the world of classical education. For me, there was an aura of there being better things and worse things- that not all art is equal, not all literature is equal, and not all actions are good. There are standards of excellence. There is Truth.
I love all this. Maybe I was brainwashed or conditioned, but if so, I like what I was brainwashed into because it certainly makes sense to me. It felt to me as if I was being welcomed into what I really wanted the world to be like, warts and all, because believing that excellence and truth exist, that means you have to live up to them, and it implies that people often do not (what reason is there for a standard if it is the status quo?).
It's always been an intriguing question to me whether these Classical ideas are really better, or whether that's brainwashing, illusions, so on. In The Silver Chair (by Lewis, again, what must you all be thinking?) the Witch is enchanting the characters to believe that what they came from (the surface of the earth) is not real; that only under-the-surface is real. The Sun they invented by looking at her lamp and imagining a bigger and better lamp. If I am wrong and Truth is made up, I would far rather believe in it than not, as they replied to her about their apparently made-up world.
So, is classical music actually such a great form of music? Is Dickens such very good literature? What of the great, classic painters? Is The Lord of the Rings such a great story? Are these better than pop culture? Could there be a hierarchy of music, values of worth?
I have always felt that we have left Excellence. It is not a value in our society anymore. Beauty no longer is a standard that art should aspire to. It is as if we don't believe in beauty, truth, or any of the other standards we used to think existed. Yet, underneath it all it seems that the desire for all this is still there, and I wonder if we are creating generations of very lost people by divorcing ourselves from these standards. They were our life and breath. They make us Man. We will turn ourselves into only animals if we keep on the course we are in... and we really have forgotten our roots. We really have. Even I have, yet still wanting to believe this. It's very hard to firmly plant yourself in these old standards when everyone around you so obviously doesn't feel the same- people now want to live 'their truth' and feel their own sensations and not judge themselves. I wonder if by not judging ourselves, we are going to lose any respect we could ever have for ourselves.
I think one clue is the level in which discipline plays a role in the creation or enjoyment of the thing. A piece of art or music is great because it is inexhaustive (or approaches thereunto); the more one returns to it, the more there is to discover, and what is there is good. It lifts the mind higher.
ReplyDelete(continued from circulation desk)
ReplyDeleteI think that's why great art is often denigrated in modern society-- it's seen as inaccessible, something that takes too much work to understand, and is therefore "not worth it" or not as flashy and fun as less-demanding forms of entertainment. (And that might be why popular entertainment changes so often-- it becomes exhausted.)
Ahh, to remember how I once thought about art. I have been getting into modern culture's head too much! The culture of considering art as merely self-expression destroys all the potential of art- how art can be (or is?) something which points infinitely beyond even the individual, yet catches the individual up into itself, carrying him to the Eternal.
ReplyDelete