I’ve been meaning to read Jacob’s Room someday. Maybe now is a good time. If only I could warp time back to 1994 and be a student again! I would take a course in Woolf in a second. It’s such a beautiful day, I guess I’ll start Jacob’s Room right now. I want something for inspiration, so Virginia Woolf is a good choice.
Two o’clock. Jacob’s Room is about undergraduate life at Cambridge in 1906. Very intellectual stuff. Some people would hate it for that reason. But Woolf speaks of higher learning very reverently. It’s interesting to see her allusions to the works that constituted the old canon, the one I knew as a student. Now history all but forgotten. Shakespeare was once a towering literary figure. Since the Millennium, just another name. There are no more intellectual giants in our culture, for better or worse. What we once venerated and exalted as great is now on a par with the mediocre. We have proven that crap is king. We’ve dumbed ourselves down. We don’t have to work so hard mentally, thanks to technological progress. We don’t have to think about anything. The answers are all provided. Thus, reading Woolf is like time travel to a better past when there were no computers to do our thinking. No tablets to finish our words for——
robgradens 