On the Cusp of Two (or more) Cultures

There's a relic on the shelves of my workplace: C. M. Bowra's Oxford Book of Greek Verse. I take it down from time to time, just to look at it fondly. I don't know when it was last checked out. I call it a relic because the title is literally true: the poetry is all in Ancient Greek--no translations. It was published in 1930, at a time when one could reasonably assume that many people (mostly men) had learned Greek and Latin in the course of their education. I wistfully imagine some old gent who walked the same sidewalks I do taking that book home to read Pindar or Hesiod in the original.

I don't know Greek or Latin--a fact I used to regret very much but no longer do. Nevertheless I still think it a little sad that a classical education has largely gone the way of the mastodon. Partly because I can identify just a little with the people who had that education, or at least with a feeling some of them must have had as they saw the generations after them growing up ignorant of learning they considered essential. In college my teacher for a course in Shakespeare's tragedies was an old Oxonian steeped in the classics. I remember him fondly because he was such a kindly man. But I also remember his visible distress on discovering I hadn't read Aeschylus. He told me to go home and read The Oresteia: "Without a working knowledge of those plays you simply aren't an educated person." A number of my friends to whom I've told that story are appalled by the bigotry of the comment, by the Dead White Male world view it expresses, but I can laugh sadly about it in some small way, because I know that feeling: I experience it with teenage library patrons all the time. A girl has to read a biography of a famous woman and when I suggest names I discover she has no idea who Susan B. Anthony or Dorothy Day are. A boy needs a "classic novel" to read for school and I tell him about The Red Badge of Courage and 1984 as if they were personal secrets of mine.

I have similar experiences with friends and co-workers as well. At work one day I sardonically quoted a passage of the King James Bible that I thought particularly apt to the situation. I got a blank look instead of a smile of recognition.

Of course, there's much more to all this besides changing conceptions of what an education is. In the case of my teenage patrons it's a result of a sharp decline in educational standards, and (probably) people who aren't readers raising their children to be non-readers. And that classical education I can feel so wistful about was part of a rigidly stratified society culturally dominated by white males. And my prized knowledge of the King James Bible is product of an oppressive cultural environment that I am still recovering from. But still....

Addendum: Critic Gail Caldwell wrote an essay that covered similar issues with much more depth (and a somewhat different take) in yesterday's Globe. Unfortunately it's only available to subscribers at the moment. Hopefully it will soon be available in its entirety elsewhere on the web.