The Penguin Scholar

Culture has broadened and flattened. If you were a dramatist, you might say the Internet is the death of the age of depth. But what became the Internet is the capstone; the real pyramid has been a drive to publication - a commercial will to found a reading public that spends money. But that stuff has a remarkable dessicatory quality; it sucks dry the giblets and leaves the bone. Hence an affecting similarity between the image of a casual reader of "the classics", and the Paleontologist.

Specifics: a body can come home after work, pick up a Penguin classic, and read, in a fairly good selection of translations, any tradition he pleases. Moreover, these things lie in bookstores ready to ambush him. While his right hand is massaging the Princesse de Cleves, his left has found the spine of Fear and Trembling, while his feet are already making contact with Cao Xueqin near the end of the row.

Most everybody can read these things. They are there to be read, and moreover, are in normal English. This does not disvalue learning a language, but it does mean that now more than ever a man can "get at" the significant wisdoms of the Earth via English. Only the specialist need learn a foreign language. If we do learn them, it's to speak them. Reading a work of literature "in the original" is a fetishistical notion that blurrs the easiness of the actual deed. Literary English is the best preparation for any other literary language; as is usual, they are more akin to each other than to the dialect.

This state of easy literacy likens us almost to monolingualism. The culture of Confucius and Homer was monolingual. Or rather, was more focused on interal dialect and accent over completely barbarous tongues. The culture of Jefferson and Voltaire, and of data hungry Europe and America in the early 20th century, by contrast, was polylingual.