Thursday, August 11, 2005
A Few Thoughts
I'm back home, with Internet access again. (Did anything important happen in my absence? Not much, by the looks of it. Good.)
Terry Teachout has grabbed my attention with a long theater-review column that contained this gem:
More and more I question the ultimate value of any criticism whose immediate purpose is not to bring its readers into direct contact with beauty (or shorten the amount of time they spend in contact with ugliness). The purpose of my professional life is to make people happier, and I try not to let myself forget that my way of bringing it about can never be anything more than an imperfect means to a blessed end. C.S. Lewis said it better than I can: “If we have to choose, it is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.”Amen. (Or, as a Roger Law cartoon put it in 1962: "I go to the theater to be entertained . . . I don't want to see rape, sodomy, and drug addiction. I can get all that at home.")
More later.
