Today I was talking with someone I’ve known for a while. I had always known him to be an intelligent person, interested in people and ideas.<\/p>\n
I happened to mention that I was going to see a theater production of Jane Eyre. He gave me a blank look, because, it seems, he had never heard of Jane Eyre.<\/p>\n
He said the name reminded him of the name of a character in Game of Thrones, and he went on for a bit about how many times he had binged Game of Thrones. In that moment I felt a yawning gulf between us.<\/p>\n
And just last week I was talking to a young playwright — a very good one. He was telling me that he had an idea for a play that would be told successively from the varying points of view of different characters.<\/p>\n
I said, “Oh, like Rashomon!” It turned out that he had never heard of Rashomon.<\/p>\n
I found myself wondering whether the classics are simply fading from our collective consciousness. Perhaps they are now thought of as culturally irrelevant.<\/p>\n
Yet the classics contain so many wonderful ideas, ways of thinking about and expressing things, and deep insights into the human condition. That’s why they are classics.<\/p>\n
I found myself wondering what to say to the young playwright. Should I just let it go?<\/p>\n
Reader, I harried him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I was talking with someone I’ve known for a while. I had always known him to be an intelligent person, interested in people and ideas. I happened to mention that I was going to see a theater production of Jane Eyre. He gave me a blank look, because, it seems, he had never heard … Continue reading “Classics”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24189"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24189"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24190,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24189\/revisions\/24190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}