02-21-2019, 12:36 PM
(02-21-2019, 12:11 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: As I recall, during 1T there are a few ways around the strictures of a bland, spirit dead society-poetry, painting, music.
Awakenings may see the culture blossom , but I expect only bit and pieces of quality during the other turnings.
One way is to rediscover the rich lode of intellectual achievements of what might as well be antiquity because creative activities like theirs just are not being done anymore.
Need I remind people that with a reader (your computer can function as such) and Project Gutenberg that they can get access to all literary classics now in the public domain, which includes practically anything in final form from 1923 or earlier? Besides, we have a huge supply of good stuff on the remainder rack.
We have art museums, virtual as well as physical. What excuse do people have for being bored except that they are stranded in numbing work or have settled for awful entertainment. The old suggestion, "Go read a book -- a great book" -- is as valid now as it was in the 1920s.
We have plenty of smart people with time on their hands, and most people can do a little art of their own. I am something of a primitive-abstract fusion, neurotic as such may seem. Well, most artists have been neurotic. OK, Bach and Shakespeare seem very rational.
Have a reader and Wi-Fi, and maybe a good pair of headphones, and you have access to great riches of culture. Education is for learning how to find those and not resorting to the Idiot Screen for empty, insipid, titillating schlock, the intellectual equivalent of junk food.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.