new interests develop as I age
I find that as I grow older, the more interested I am in the mundane. For example, here's what I was interested in when I was, say, 20:
literature, music, the opacity of language, the existence or non-existence of God, whether the Romantics were truly greater than the Classicists, whether Milton had read the Kaballah, the exact relationship between Keats's Hyperion poems and Miltonic poetry, the relationship between rock music and Romantic aesthetics.
Here are topics that are of more interest to me now:
the sweet smell of soap, heart-healthy oatmeal, socks, really really comfortable socks, telephone surveys, more socks, getting a good deal on shoes, the possibility of owning a minivan
Yet I feel that my interests are in fact DEEPER and more profound today. I think all that art and philosophy stuff -- the way I thought about it at 20 at least -- was kind of cliche and superficial. What really matters more in the world -- what Percy Shelley felt about marriage or whether or not people are warm and comfortable and have enough to eat? And my really comfortable socks?
literature, music, the opacity of language, the existence or non-existence of God, whether the Romantics were truly greater than the Classicists, whether Milton had read the Kaballah, the exact relationship between Keats's Hyperion poems and Miltonic poetry, the relationship between rock music and Romantic aesthetics.
Here are topics that are of more interest to me now:
the sweet smell of soap, heart-healthy oatmeal, socks, really really comfortable socks, telephone surveys, more socks, getting a good deal on shoes, the possibility of owning a minivan
Yet I feel that my interests are in fact DEEPER and more profound today. I think all that art and philosophy stuff -- the way I thought about it at 20 at least -- was kind of cliche and superficial. What really matters more in the world -- what Percy Shelley felt about marriage or whether or not people are warm and comfortable and have enough to eat? And my really comfortable socks?
posted by Mark Meritt at 5:23 PM
9 Comments:
Do you think your profession affects your changing views? I mean, do you need a different outlet? I am thinking of a friend I had who used to love to doodle and make all sorts of drawings - he was really gifted and he loved it. But he became a graphic designer and that became his job, so art was no longer a completely satisfying outlet for him and he had to find something new.
I opted for balance with a Bing Crosby CD in one hand and warm oatmeal in the other.
I suspect that you have known too many professors who never achieved adulthood.You know, Leslie Fiedler was once bitten on one buttock by my pet wolf, and he dined out on the anecdote for months,regaling other professors. He knew how to work that crowd.
Dad, what different things do Bing Crosby and oatmeal represent?? Does Bing stand for pseudo-profundity, or does the oatmeal? :-)
I wish our profession required us to think about big philosophical questions all the time, but most of the time, it's not like that--perhaps because we're concentrating on writing, and are seen as service courses for the rest of the university... I have definitely heard English professors say that reading is no fun anymore. But I don't think Mark feels that way... maybe he will weigh in and tell us!
The Romantics were definitely greater, especially with their hit, "What I Like About You."
On a slightly (but not much more) serious and arm-waving note, I think when one is younger, one likes to think of oneself as "the s*@#." That means thinking about deep things, knowing more XYZ than the next person, living as if prepping for the next round of college or job applications.
As you get older and mommy and daddy don't pay for everything, the importance of basics asserts itself. It's all about food, shelter, comfort, happiness, love, connections. I think Morrie Schwartz of Tuesdays With Morrie was right about "love each other or perish," which is weird coming from me since I'm not touchy-feely at all. But you can't take it with you when you go. You take care of yourself and of others in the best way you know how. To be cliche, it's fine to keep your head in the clouds as long as your feet are planted firmly on the ground, which is sounds like they are.
Well, oatmeal clearly stands for pseudo profundity when it claims to prevent heart disease. When it claims to help empty your system, that's a major true profundity. Bing Crosby's version of "Mexicali Rose" is a tragic tale of loss and lies ("wipe your big brown eyes and smile, dear"), but his version of "the Bells of Saint Mary's" is without value.
Deb,
I think you are right about the role of maturation in instilling a kind of better awareness of where we are in the world -- the increasingly demanding mundane world.
No, I don't think my profession has really changed my views. It's not that I don't appreciate "finer" things as much. I just appreciate seemingly simpler things more; I can be equally philosophical about poems and pairs of socks. In fact, my feeling is that there is pressure in our culture to blow a lot of hot air about things we are SUPPOSED to feel more strongly about, according to the culture guardians. (I've got a streak of what I consider anti-elitism that leads to some kneejerk reactions on my part.)
More to come...but very briefly, I enjoy reading and other "aesthetic experiences" (especially films) probably more than I ever have. I just think my ideas about them have changed in ways I can't easily categorize. And I just really appreciate comfortable socks a lot more than I used to.
I think that at least part of what's going on here is the grown-up realization that the mature mind finds, ironically, deeper profundity in the concrete and the specific than it does in the ethereal and high-falutin'. For example, I'll teach Romantic and even Victorian poetry and be respectful toward it, but at the end of the day Nature, Virtue, Eternity, and the rest of the capitalized and anthropomorphized extended family come off as so much hot air, with little heft beyond what can be mustered by hamfisted sloganeering and overbroad generalizations.
Pablo Neruda's odes, on the other hand, are lively, real, exciting, moving, and visceral...and he's even got one (a wonderful one, too) about socks! There's something that is somehow more compelling, more accessible and immediate and meaningful, about the, er, mundane, and it actually functions much better as a doorway to real epiphany than all that huffing and puffing about Inspiration or Mortality.
Michael,
That's interesting because another school of thought would suggest that we move from concrete to abstract thinking as we "mature," though I don't necessarily buy that process.
I definitely feel an increasing appreciation for things that might seem more concrete and perhaps "Classical" in aesthetic terms, though I still love Romantic and Victorian poetry. It's true that the kind of sublime rhetoric in those periods usually appeals to younger, more idealistic readers -- even within the Romantic tradition itself, you see poets get less vigorous with age (if they live past 36 as none of the second generation male English Romantics did). I still love Byron, Shelley, Coleridge, and Keats, though, but maybe it's in the same way I love progressive rock bands like Rush who sound pretty silly to me now, as far as lyrics go, and who certainly go "over the top" in ways I appreciate but make me smile and laugh a bit at this age.
Qualification:
Reading over my last entry, I would probably take something back. Rush music and lyrics DO indeed seem silly to me. Romantic poetry, though? No, I can't say that. I still believe that "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is -- for me -- the greatest English poem ever written, and my top ten English - or British, I should say -- poems would contain at least several Romantics and at least one Tennyson poem. I do agree that they're a lofty, often bathetic bunch. But I still find Coleridge's "Dejection," "Wordsworth's "Intimations Ode," "Tintern Abbey," and "The Ruined Cottage," along with big chunks of Byron and Shelley's "Mont Blanc," "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," and MANY others among the most moving of English poems. Part of that is because the Romantic poets are very wrongly (in large part due to their own representations of themselves) cast as lesser "craftsmen" -- as more impassioned scribblers. For example, Shelley, who is often characterized as a kind of stereotypical Romantic ranter, wrote most of his poems in specific stanzaic or metrical forms -- no free verse (NOT that free verse is easy by any means -- it's a different kind of complexity), and often not even blank verse. Read "Julian and Maddalo" as an example of his expert use of heroic couplets -- one that I think exceeds Pope and Dryden in its subtlety (though I love Pope and Dryden too). Also, I think the Romantics are underestimated as intellectuals. It's hard to find another generation of English poets that can rival the philsophical depth of the goupr that included Coleridge and Shelley. T. S. Eliot said he outgrew Shelley at 17. I understand that; Shelley gets pretty ridiculous and self-involved (and indeed much of my dissertation was devoted to debunking Romantic deification of poetic "geniuses:). However -- no offense to Eliot fans because I love his poetry too -- in my opinion Shelley was Eliot's intellectual superior. (You have to like his politics a little more than those of the anti-Semitic monarchist Eliot too.) In reading Shelley's prose works, I find a more complex (yet more bombastic, I guess) discussion of the relationship between language, identity, and thought than I find in Eliot's essays (as good as they are).
So, in sum, I guess I still love the Romantic poets, in spite of Shelley's
"I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!"
Sounds like Judas Priest lyrics -- maybe that's why I like it :-)
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