Regarding Classics

Somewhere in his Lapidaria Kapuscinski describes dropping in on an airport bookstore and finding in it not a single classic; all the books in it were by contemporary authors, authors he has never heard of; they were, he felt, all flash-in-the-pan: here today, gone tomorrow; destined to be pulped at the end of the season and replaced by another crop of identical perfectly forgettable annuals. Kapuscinski’s reaction to this was a species of disbelief: the endless cycle of writing, publishing, pulping, forgetting and writing something else again (only to be soon pulped and forgotten again) seemed to him preposterous.

Somehow, Kapuscinski’s reaction resonates strongly with me; but I cannot say why. When I stop to think about it, my emotional reaction appears to me illogical. To Kapuscinski’s mind, I suppose, one either writes for eternity; or one writes for nothing: a kind of non-omnis moriar. But this cannot be true: though it may not seem to him this way at the moment of writing, once an author dies he becomes wholly indifferent as to whether anyone still reads his work.

And the corollary of the above, the claim that one either reads the eternal or one reads nothing, cannot be true, either. Having read much classics and a little contemporary fiction, I am not sure that the classics really are better. Is Madame Bovary, or Il Purgatorio, really better than, say, The Difference Engine? I can’t see how.

Or perhaps the preference for the lasting is a kind of longing to participate – read what others read as if that were more relevant somehow than reading what no one else seems to read?
Then there is the reverence for the past. Portugal is a good illustration. Camões begins the Canto Primeiro of his Lusiades:

As armas e os barões assinalados,
Que da ocidental praia Lusitana,
Por mares nunca de antes navegados,
Passaram ainda além da Taprobana,
Em perigos e guerras esforçados,
Mais do que prometia a força humana,
E entre gente remota edificaram
Novo Reino, que tanto sublimaram;

Joao V built an expensive (and useless) aqueduct to bring in freshwater from Monsanto. Libson’s rooftops bristle with Roman pine cones, urns and cypresses.

It was always so. When in 379 B.C. Theban plotters set out from Athens over the Kithairon to overthrown the pro-Spartan tyrannical regime, they noted that there were only six of them and, out of reverence for the past (and the great epic of Seven Against Thebes), added a seventh.

The past resonates with us and an artful appeal to it can add grand significance to the humdrum present. If we didn't have classics, what would we appeal to?