By Arnold Weinstein
From Homer and Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and Jonathan Safran Foer, significant works of literature have greatly to educate us approximately of life's most important stages'growing up and aging. Distinguised pupil Arnold Weinstein's provocative and interesting new booklet, Morning, midday, and evening, explores vintage writing's insights into coming-of-age and surrendering to time, and considers the influence of these Read more...
summary: From Homer and Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and Jonathan Safran Foer, significant works of literature have very much to educate us approximately of life's most important stages'growing up and getting old. Distinguised student Arnold Weinstein's provocative and fascinating new publication, Morning, midday, and evening, explores vintage writing's insights into coming-of-age and surrendering to time, and considers the effect of those revelations upon our lives. With knowledge, humor, and relocating own observations, Weinstein leads us to seem deep inside of ourselves and those nice books, to work out how we will use artwork as either reflect and consultant. He bargains incisive readings of seminal novels approximately childhood'Huck Finn's empathy for the runaway slave Jim illuminates a kid's ethical schooling; Catherine and Heathcliff's fight with obsessive ardour in Wuthering Heights is hauntingly general to many younger fanatics; Dickens's Pip, in nice expectancies, needs to grapple with a global that wants him damage; and in Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical Persepolis, little Marjane faces a distinct type of struggle'growing into early life as her kingdom strikes in the course of the discomfort of the Iranian Revolution. In flip, nice writers additionally examine the teachings discovered in life's twilight years: either King Lear and Willy Loman undergo as their patriarchal authority collapses and demise creeps up; Brecht's mom braveness screens the inspiring indomitability of an getting older girl who has "borne each attainable blow. . . yet remains to be status, nonetheless moving." And older love can occasionally be humorous (Rip Van Winkle very easily sleeps throughout his marriage) and infrequently tragic (as J.M. Coetzee's David Lurie learns the demanding method, in Disgrace). Tapping into the hearts and minds of memorable characters, from Sophocles' oedipus to Artie in paintings Spiegelman's Maus, Morning, midday, and evening makes an eloquent and robust case for the function of serious literature as a understanding window into our lives and instances. Its intelligence, ardour, and actual appreciation for the written note remind us simply how the most important books are to the enterprise of being human. From the Hardcover variation
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Sample text
One feels that this is the very machinery of destiny: the death battle between old and young, father and son. And so the son commits the species-defining act of libido, as Freud saw it: he slays his father. Again one is stunned by the eloquence: “Short work,” Oedipus claims, little knowing that this work will be immortal, framing not only his own entire temporal existence but that of all others to come; “every mother’s son,” the young killer exults, “I killed them all”: how can we fail to see what is damning here, that the fruits of this act will be for Oedipus the son to enter his own mother’s bed, something Freud saw as the desire of “every mother’s son”?
We know that time is among the grand culprits, steathily eroding event into memory and memory into ashes. But even if you recalled every single act of your life, could call them all up on some kind of screen, would you know how to put them together, what they add up to? Hence, those are the large issues I am after. Not unlike Thoreau, who elected to live in a hut at Walden Pond in order to grab life by the throat, I seek to get at the pith of things, to take measures. Especially beginnings and endings.
During the several years I have spent writing this book, I have moved, at a surprising speed, into the territory of old age. And I began to realize that these literary matters were disturbingly existential for me, that I was in effect doing my own crash course in learning about the challenges, travails, surprises, and (hopefully) rewards of growing old. At the far side of this book now, I am a rather different person than I was when I first envisaged this study: closer to retirement, more aware of physical decline, more attuned to my own gathering exit from much I had taken for granted, more certain that I (like peers my age) am increasingly engaged in dodging bullets.
