Good letters made good men. Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses?

the irritable searching after reasons

There are days when I feel so sick of trying to justify literature that I no longer want to try. What need do we have of reasons and arguments in the face of poetry? Art justifies itself. Like the growing of a great tree or a bird song heard on the breeze, art finds its place in the world.

It is the “state of the humanities”, and the state of the “discourse”, which make this issue all rather vexed and vexing. Why so much debate about Great Books programs?

Not only am I far more alarmed about the fertility crisis, I just don’t see how this all hinges on undergraduate education—too often, an undergraduate education that involves very little writing. When I was at Oxford we wrote between two and six thousand words of essay every week. I cannot find the necessary sense of alarm that some of America’s future lawyers and engineers might miss the chance to go to two dozen seminars and write two essays in total. There are literature PhDs who haven’t even read Chaucer for God’s sake. If we can’t do it, why should they?1

If they need this learning so badly for instrumental reasons, why can’t they do it at school, at the library, at their grandmother’s knee? Yes, yes, I know, our grandmothers no longer read Dickens aloud as it was read to them. But that is rather my point. Literature has already gone out with the tide as a central part of culture. Shakespeare’s audience had the choice of a brothel, an inn, or a bear-baiting pit when they left the Globe. There was no Netflix, no radio, no Twitter. That was then, this is now. Go to the pub with a group of highly educated people. One thing they will all have in common is a working knowledge of the sitcoms of their youth. Friends, or The Simpsons. A few charts about the decline of reading won’t make it 1852 again.

I sound confused because I feel confused. We don’t need arguments for the humanities. No-one argues that we need bees or flowers or summer rain. Obviously it is good and necessary to have the academic humanities.

If you don’t understand that, you don’t need me to make you another numbered list or to find the right form of words to make it ...