Quote of the Day
From Theodore Dalrymple's essay, "The Dystopian Imagination," in Our Culture, What's Left of It:
"For both Huxley and Orwell, one man symbolized resistance to the dehumanizing disconnection of man from his past: Shakespeare. In both writers, he stands for the highest pinnacle of human self-understanding, without which human life loses its depth and its possibility of transcendence. In Brave New World, possessing an old volume of Shakespeare that has mysteriously survived protects a man from the enfeebling effects of a purely hedonistic life. A few lines are sufficient to make him realize the superficiality of the Brave New World:
Is there no pity sitting in the coulds
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O, sweet my mother, cast me not away!
And when Winston Smith wakes in 1984 from a dream about a time before the Revolution, when people were still human, a single word rises to his lips, for reasons that he does not understand: Shakespeare.
This scene takes me back to Pyongyang. I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the the Great People's Study House -- all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata -- when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, 'Do you speak English?'
An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, 'Down with Big Brother!'
'Yes,' I replied.
'I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life.'
It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself.
Orwell and Huxley had the imagination to understand why -- unlike me, who had to go to Pyongyang to find out."
"For both Huxley and Orwell, one man symbolized resistance to the dehumanizing disconnection of man from his past: Shakespeare. In both writers, he stands for the highest pinnacle of human self-understanding, without which human life loses its depth and its possibility of transcendence. In Brave New World, possessing an old volume of Shakespeare that has mysteriously survived protects a man from the enfeebling effects of a purely hedonistic life. A few lines are sufficient to make him realize the superficiality of the Brave New World:
Is there no pity sitting in the coulds
That sees into the bottom of my grief?
O, sweet my mother, cast me not away!
And when Winston Smith wakes in 1984 from a dream about a time before the Revolution, when people were still human, a single word rises to his lips, for reasons that he does not understand: Shakespeare.
This scene takes me back to Pyongyang. I was in the enormous and almost deserted square in front of the the Great People's Study House -- all open spaces in Pyongyang remain deserted unless filled with parades of hundreds of thousands of human automata -- when a young Korean slid surreptitiously up to me and asked, 'Do you speak English?'
An electric moment: for in North Korea, unsupervised contact between a Korean and a foreigner is utterly unthinkable, as unthinkable as shouting, 'Down with Big Brother!'
'Yes,' I replied.
'I am a student at the Foreign Languages Institute. Reading Dickens and Shakespeare is the greatest, the only pleasure of my life.'
It was the most searing communication I have ever received in my life. We parted immediately afterward and of course will never meet again. For him, Dickens and Shakespeare (which the regime permitted him to read with quite other ends in view) guaranteed the possibility not just of freedom but of truly human life itself.
Orwell and Huxley had the imagination to understand why -- unlike me, who had to go to Pyongyang to find out."
posted by Kate Marie | 9:09 AM | Permalink
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