Four friends were casually complaining about costly monthly cable bills that deliver nothing worth watching when I mentioned that I was again viewing “The Age of Innocence.” It’s Martin Scorsese’s 1993 adaption of Edith Wharton’s 1920s novel of the same name chronicling tensions between individual freedom and the unspoken (but unanimously understood) societal norms of New York’s 1870s Gilded Age.
I was surprised that no one had heard of the book, the movie, or Edith Wharton. My friends are college graduates, two with advanced degrees.
Coincidentally, I recently read Meghan Cox Gurdon’s July 22 Wall Street Journal column, “Put Down the Phone and Pull Out a Book,” where she rails against a culture that is growing increasingly distant from reading.
Gurdon writes, “Poetry and literature are art forms that can lift a person from blinkered individual existence to sublime and broadened understanding. Books form a great reverberating conversation across the centuries, joining the minds of men and women long dead with those alive today. If we lose reading, we lose the connection, and we consign future generations to a kind of witless groping around in cultural obscurity.”
I agree. I am neither bibliophile nor scholar. I was raised in a blue-collar, Philadelphia row home. Shy, I gravitated to reading early on.
A corner drugstore minutes from our house had a swivel rack of paperback books. As a teen, I would walk there on Sunday evenings to pick up the early Philadelphia Inquirer for sports scores and browse the book rack. Over time I bought books like Leon Uris’s “Exodus,” John Steinbeck’s “The Moon is Down,” and Joseph Heller’s hilariously absurdist, “Catch- 22.”
A literature class assignment in college introduced me to Shakespeare. We were tasked to discern and discuss Bard’s use of symbolism in his tragedy, “Othello.”
With its themes of jealousy, deceit—-and yes—-racism, Shakespeare masterfully exposes this dark side of human nature as endemic to humankind and not, as some believe, unique to modern capitalistic societies.
I read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” in my early twenties.
I once read that God does not punish immoral acts. The act itself, with its embedded feelings of fear and guilt, inflicts its own punishment.
Today, some might call Dostoevsky’s Rodion Raskolnikov an elitist.
He sees himself intellectually superior to the common person. When in pursuit of what he considers the greater good, his ends always justify his means.
In the novel Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker (and her sister) for the greater good of his pocketbook.
Rather than feeling relief and satisfaction in the wake of the act, he is tortured with fear, guilt, paranoia, isolation, and remorse, punishment he has inflicted on himself.
What was true in Dostoevsky’s time is true today: every act has consequences.
As Gurdon says, the words of Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, and others “form a great reverberating conversation across the centuries, joining the minds of men and women long dead with those alive today” to teach truths which can only be learned by pulling out a book.