By mediachic
There is a certain quality about going back in time to revisit the creativity of the mighty days of yore. The lore there was fantastical, where any perfectly constructed run-on sentence seemed like a work of magnanimous proportions, even if the times were laden with endless toil and little food, except for a spot of porridge here or there. If the masses were fortunate to have crops for harvest, or for a pittance earned, they scrounged enough together for the coveted goose once or twice a year to be shared with others.
I own a first edition related to Charles Dickens—not one he wrote himself, but one penned by his sister a year after he passed. She talked about how he traveled, how he was always on the move, promoting his works or just as a featured speaker at theaters everywhere for his passion for writing. He probably was the first to popularize a wave of awareness at that time of the vast rift in society between the rich and poor.
Old things become new again
Sounds a little like today as the barometer of wealth is priced in affordability of eggs or energy.
I love to read the oldies, and I do mean oldies, like 1700s or 4,000 B.C., because it seems like such a simpler time—but maybe not. We do tend to diminish what the old-timers endured.
We like to think we have it the worst of all.
I like to look at the lives of the early writers. Les Trois Mousquetaires by Alexandre Dumas now goes for around $10,000 first edition. What a lot of us don’t know is that he was half African, something that he addressed in his memoirs, about how he dealt with colonialism and racism to become one of the most respected authors of all time.
“Now, had I been illegitimate I should quietly have accepted the bar as more celebrated bastards than I have done, and, like them, I should have laboured arduously with mind or body until I had succeeded in giving a personal value to my name. But what is to be done, gentlemen? I am not illegitimate, and it is high time the public followed my lead—and resigned itself to my legitimacy.”
But if the good old days is where to escape the current daily madness of the nightly news, it’s not for long before we revisit the historical timeline. Our literary heroes and sheroes endured their fair share of calamities, albeit camouflaged and hidden from public view. During the turmoil of the 60s, the façade of the suburbs and the white picket fence blew up through the war abroad and war at home, so eloquently captured with another literary giant, James Baldwin, in the famous Baldwin/Buckley debate.
There’s still magic in the smell of ink on the page.
Despite those times, there is much consolation in curling up with a good old book for its archaic elegance, the curiosity of who read this book 100 years before you. Although, like Hemingway, the flowery words are only to be used sparingly. He famously once rebutted critical claims of William Faulkner, “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
Tip: There is a sense of strength and wisdom with the ancient ones. Frodo, hairy feet and all, is the great escape—the place to slow down, reflect on the prose, and delve into the deeper meaning of the challenged lives and triumphs of those little people under the earth.
