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Quotable

November 9, 2007 at 9:19 pm · Filed under Uncategorized

From Gerald Stanley Lee’s The Lost Art of Reading, 1902:

The population of the civilised world today may be divided into two classes,—millionaires and those who would like to be millionaires. The rest are artists, poets, tramps, and babies—and do not count. Poets and artists do not count until after they are dead. Tramps are put in prison. Babies are expected to get over it. A few more summers, a few more winters—with short skirts or with down on their chins—they shall be seen burrowing with the rest of us.

One almost wonders sometimes, why it is that the sun keeps on year after year and day after day turning the globe around and around, heating it and lighting it and keeping things growing on it, when after all, when all is said and done (crowded with wonder and with things to live with, as it is), it is a comparatively empty globe. No one seems to be using it very much, or paying very much attention to it, or getting very much out of it. There are never more than a very few men on it at a time, who can be said to be really living on it. They are engaged in getting a living and in hoping that they are going to live sometime. They are also going to read sometime.

britta said,

November 9, 2007 @ 10:40 pm

my shakespeare professor would say that’s a description of a classic patriarchal power system — the dominant/empowered men negotiating with each other for more power, the children waiting to enter that hierarchy, and the emergent artists/poets/tramps biting away at the edges and mostly (mostly) getting contained by the dominant.

Tozier said,

November 10, 2007 @ 7:54 am

With the fillip that Lee (over and over, in many books, and in interminable and convoluted sentences that reek of tangential poetry, or at least some species of hand-waving hypnotic glorious oratory) suggests there is a tiny minority who can step aside, have time to sit and read and think, and manage to stop trying to make a living in the patriarchal power system—or I suppose in the matriarchal social categorization and subtle all-nurturing dynamic, if we’re talking Long Ago—and live instead.

In a way it’s just “kids these days” and “can’t we all just get along” and “things are gone all to hell” all over again… but he does it gloriously.

Nic McPhee said,

November 10, 2007 @ 9:37 am

What an amazing quote! Was the bit you posted on twitter about civilization being the dust we scuffle also from this fellow? Remarkable stuff, remarkable stuff. Love the bit about “babies are supposed to get over it” :-).

If artists and poets really only count after they’re dead, does that actually make them any less important?

Tozier said,

November 10, 2007 @ 10:06 am

Yes, those were quotes from Lee as well. I was proofing this book at Distributed Proofreaders.

And of course Lee’s point is to be ironic. Go page through the Google Book Search edition until we release the Gutenberg electronic version, and I think you’ll understand the irony.

Tozier said,

November 10, 2007 @ 8:03 pm

Later, @britta, I find

It seems to have been overlooked while we are all analytically falling at Shakespeare’s feet, that Shakespeare did not become Shakespeare by analytically falling at any one’s feet–not even at his own–and that the most important difference between being a Shakespeare and being an analyser of Shakespeare is that with the man Shakespeare no submitting of himself to the analysis-gymnast would ever have been possible, and with the students of Shakespeare (as students go and if they are caught young enough) the habit of analysis is not only a possibility but a sleek, industrious, and complacent certainty.

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