If You Read Just One Thing Today
Christopher Hitchens can get on one’s nerves, but he does entertain when he’s locked and loaded. In this month’s Vanity Fair, he gives Gore Vidal his due and then dissects his craziness. It’s worth reading for this sentence:
Who but Gore could begin a discussion by saying that the three most dispiriting words in the English language were “Joyce Carol Oates”?
1 comment
When the public or any media organization is in such compulsion to wonder about “who the Oscar Wilde for our own day” it leads to asses like Vidal who shower their pseudo-nuanced views with so many sarcastic rhetorical flourishes that people believe in whatever he says because of the style.
The fault is in the stupid fucking question “who is the Oscar Wilde for our day”. Elevating men to myths creates people who feel entitled to make ridiculous statements. There is no “Oscar Wilde for our day”. They’re 2 completely different contexts even if they’re both at base political socialists with a penchant for aggrandizing world “problems”.
This article by Hitchens confirms for me ever more how necessary it is for people to reread and reread all the platonic dialogues, and have a strong background in philosophy. If people did no one would ask these false metaphysical historical questions that don’t realize how much ego-inflation is involved in trying raise a relative history to something more than it already is.
The progression of man will happen when he (man) stops deriving his sense of self from some historical past he has no real access to except for books that can never do any justification for the lived experience of a time. As Man looks at the Monkey, The “Overman” will look to Man as being so parasitically attached to “History”.