We get letters

[pecunium]

The internet is a strange and wonderful place.

A while back, there was a conversation about how soldiers are seen. It drifted, as such conversations will in that group. Someone posted a Wilfred Owen poem.

I like Wilfred Owen, somewhere I have his complete works, as annotated by Sigfried Sassoon, working with Owen's notes, letters, and drafts. It's an amazing book, because Owen did a lot of crafting. He didn't just knock them out, he worked at them.

So someone (an instructor, I believe) sent me a note about that subject. He had some questions/recollections about a line in Dulce et decorum est.

I'm pleasantly shocked. It isn't that he sent me a note, to mention it. It isn't that he sent me a follow-up, after he'd found an answer.

No, it's that in doing research (on a semi-obscure, these days, poet of The Great War; and one who deserves to be better known, but I digress) found a throwaway comment I made.

I love libraries. One of the sadnesses, to me, of my not having a degree, is that I can't be a reader at the Huntington (well, I suppose that, were there someone doing research who told them I was their reader, I might be allowed onto the rolls). I love them because they have books.

And books are no small part of what makes H.Sap. different from the other animals. We can collect the things we've learned in our lives, and pass them on to others. Spoken language is good for that (and with a good oral culture, the time which information can last is thousands of years. The Aboriginal people of Australia have accounts of a meteor which landed there sometime around the year 1000), but print media are better, because the repository is passive.

All of us who blog, we have (so long as the internets last) entered into the company of Aristotle, Li Po, Basho, Donne, Machiavelli, Dante, &c, &c, &c..

That's amazing.

Comments

[lalouve.livejournal.com]

One of the great advantages of the internet, to me (who's a PhD and university teacher) is that I encounter people who read. My colleagues do, mostly, read, but they read literary theory and set books for classes: for people who read for the love of reading, you need amateurs. An amateur, after all, means someone who does the thing for sheer love of it.

If I may?

[wolodymyr.livejournal.com]

The only time thus far in life I've trotted out my Harvard degree with a purpose was in an effort to get into the Huntington to look at some of their 18th century court manuscripts for my law review note. BA from Harvard, JD then in progress from USC. I was dismissed haughtily and condescendingly by a woman who, in the course of our conversation, managed through error to make perfectly clear she had no idea what manuscripts I was talking about.

It was my closest expererience thus far with gen-u-ine aristocracy, which to me in that moment became defined as power separated from knowledge. If she'd known what I was talking about, or had come at any point to understand what I was talking about, she would have become a mere librarian, a person employed because of her knowledge. As it was, knowledge could not trouble her exercise of power - it was based only in itself, and was thus pure.

Still love to go there, though.

[pindar.livejournal.com]

Have a look at "Tommy" by Rudyard Kipling

Amen.

[fearsclave.livejournal.com]

Well put.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

There is a downside to the internet, however. You remember the Government's White House site containing transcripts of the speeches given by the President and Vice-President -- including more than a few passages that became embarrassing with the passage of time? Those transcripts seem to be blinking out, one by one. (And apparently they're being removed from the WayBackMachine's Archives, as well.) Knowledge cannot be entirely suppressed, of course, but even within the internet it can be made impractically difficult to find. I suppose the internet is inherently self-destructive by its very nature -- even if LJ blogs are searchable, when a Topic Search turns up thousands of hits, the results are non-functional in a practical sense. *sigh*

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Research has always had that problem, as my library science instructor (and then my journalism profs) always said, "it's not what you know, but what you know how to look up."

I'm amazed that he had a search string which led to that comment, because the parent posting isn't the sort of thing which would lead me to think of finding the stuff in the comment thread.

I don't know how long Lj will last, but there are number of blogs "living" past the demise of those who wrote them.

TK

[anna-en-route.livejournal.com]

In New Zealand it's pretty much required that you study WW1 poetry at some point during high school (as well as having Flanders field read out every ANZAC day celebration in primary school).

So yeah Owen and Sassoon (and Brooke for contrast)...

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

And Blunden, and (among my personal favorites, irrepective of his pre-dating, then overlapping), A. E. Houseman, and Rosenerg and even Graves.

TK