Perfectly apt and useful words can be dumbed down or debased, as currency can. What once was solid gold may soon be as worthless as monopoly money. A classic case comes to mind –classic.
We all know what a classic is supposed to be. Not just non pareil, best of its sort, even incomparable but also a creation that has stood the test of time. “Monuments of unageing intellect,” to quote a classic.
The test of time may be the most important factor. We all know how today’s “classic” can in time come to seem stale and trite until we wonder how we ever thought it good. Conversely, things overlooked sometimes mysteriously gain in value as new eyes give them a second look.
We are familiar with people speaking of classic cars. Maybe a few can qualify as classic designs, but a lot seem too recent to count and possibly too trivial. Even sillier is a case like Sony Classics, which is the movie company’s name for films in which people have relationships as opposed to blowing or beating each other up. But they are brand new films so have hardly earned the right to be called classics. And if something is called a classic by its creator that isn’t the result of judgment but of boasting. Disqualified.
Unfortunately the longevity test for excellence can tend to make classics sound boring and old-fashioned, the kind of stuff you were forced to read in school. And yet, they survive and would do so even without school because they contain real value for real readers if they will sit still for them.
In our weird, hooked up, amped up, wired, tweeting, ephemeral world we may actually be hungry for something permanent. And the enduring worth of many classics is the fact that they teach the hardest lesson of all – how to live.
The only classic many people read is the Bible and many of those readers only for the supernatural promise of a way to cheat death, for consolation. Yet most of the words of Jesus are devoted to how to live, or perhaps how to behave. To ethics.
Heaven or not, one is admonished to do unto others, to turn the other cheek, to be a good shepherd or a good Samaritan, to be a peacemaker, meek, merciful, humble, charitable, modest, non-judgmental ( the mote in the eye and the first stone stuff). An awful lot of alleged Christians seem to have heard the organ music but missed the words of Matthew 5-7. They are classic thoughts worth revisiting now and then.
And it’s good to bump into other classics that keep resurfacing. A new book which I haven’t read, but will, is called “Plato at the Googleplex.” It brings back Plato to our time to appear in places like talk shows and at TED talks and at the mall, which seems too cute by half, a transparent attempt to seem relevant in the age of silicon valley nerds and urban hipsters. But anything that persuades folks to listen to the father of western philosophy is worth a try. And Socrates hung around the mall of his day, so why not? His take on the Agora, by the way, was: “So many things I don’t want.” Which is worth pondering.
Plato is not alone in being back on the hit parade. A few years ago, Sarah Bakewell wrote the wonderful “How to Live” which introduced a new generation to the lovely work of that endlessly curious, endearingly undogmatic man Michel de Montaigne. His work might be described as how to think skeptically, in the good sense, about anything and everything beginning with our own life.
He also taught all later generations how to write as the inventor of the personal essay. Shakespeare apparently read him with affection, and without him the work of everyone from Lamb and Arnold to Orwell and E.B. White is unimaginable. Another acolyte, Emerson, said he was “the frankest and honestest of all writers” possessed of “an invincible probity.”
Stephen Greenblatt, in “The Swerve,” recently offered an introduction to Epicurean philosophy wrapped in a true life historical thriller. An early Renaissance haunter of monastic archives discovered a copy of “The Nature of Things” by Lucretius which had been lost for a millennium. It taught men not to think superstitiously of a world governed by capricious gods but by predictable decipherable physical laws. Lucretius posited a universe made up of tiny particles, one in which life evolves and whose nature and structure can de discovered through logic and reason. The swerve is an idea in Epicurean philosophy explaining how change happens, and Greenblatt argues that the reintroduction of these ancient ideas after a thousand-year sleep caused a swerve in history into new channels that led on to Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution and us.
There are plenty of other classics that can profit anyone, though they are as different as “The Art of War, “The Fire Sermon,” “Tao te ching,” or “The Prince.” Not to mention “Hamlet,” “Twelfth Night,” “Emma,” “Bleak House,” “Parade’s End,” and “The Great Gatsby”
When I was young, I had an anthology of evergreen tales called “Stories That Never Grow Old.” That’s what classics are. Next time, a word about one that meant a lot to me, once upon a time.