Good Is Old-Fashioned/Quotes
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The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal." To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.
—David Foster Wallace
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In those far-off days, the ways of our forefathers were rude and simple. Rome nowadays is all ablaze with gold, rich with the wealth of the world that she hath conquered. Look at the Capitol; compare it now with what it once was. You would say it was a temple consecrated to another Jupiter. The palace of the Senate, worthy now of the august assembly that sits within it, was, in the days when Tatius was king, nothing but a thatched cottage. These gorgeous edifices on the Palatine Hill, built in honour of Apollo and our great leaders, were once but pasture ground for oxen that dragged the plough. Let others belaud those ancient times; I am satisfied to be a child of to-day. I find it better suited to my tastes, not because nowadays we ransack the bowels of the earth for gold, and import purple dyes from distant shores; not because we see the mountains shrink because we are eternally quarrying them for marble; not because vast moles keep far away the billows of the deep; but because we enjoy the amenities of life, and because those rough and boorish ways, which for a long time characterized our ancestors, have not endured to our day.
—Ovid, The Art of Love
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Captain America (comics): Aren't the stars-and-stripes a little old-fashioned? |
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