I just want to add that, if you like this article, the author, John Crowley, is an amazing and underread novelist. Little, Big is the best fantasy novel I've read for people who are sort of lukewarm about fantasy (and one of the greatest novels of the last half century in my opinion).
Every time is see a post like this I get the urge to pretentiously rant about the ongoing decline of appreciation for aesthetic values. Tech culture often seems completely tonedeaf on artistic issues. Talking about the "value proposition" of the novel is borderline comical. If the fiction books you've read could be edited down to novella length, you should read better fiction books.
I have no idea how we got to a place where the value of Tolstoy, Cervantes, Flaubert, etc. needs to be defended from Breaking Bad and cinema (not that there's anything wrong with Breaking Bad and cinema). But apparently most people currently seem to be at a point where if they read the first few pages of "Lectures on Literature" they'd just squint their eyes, cock their heads, and proceed to not understand one part of what it means to "remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece"
At my age I've already read those authors and pretty much all the celebrated classics. I'm not sure why you think I haven't. Also, to be completely honest, many/some of those classics are fairly over-rated.
>Every time is see a post like this I get the urge to pretentiously rant about the ongoing decline of appreciation for aesthetic values.
Everytime I meet someone like you I poke into their true reading habits and its a lot of YA stuff, chick-lit, top 20 pop-culture junk, etc. Just because you read a classic once doesn't mean that the entire medium known as books gets free pass. Sturgeon's law applies to all art if we're being honest with ourselves.
The fact that fiction comes at the cost of reading non-fiction cannot be swept under the rug. Its a completely valid concern. Those in my peer group can tell me all about $popular_scifi and $popular_chicklit but not much else.
Its pretentious to think that fiction is magically superior to all other forms of communication. I think we'll look back at how incredibly overly-entertained we are today and wonder how we lived such shallow lives. That's a narrative no one talks about: how much fiction we're constantly consuming and the incredibly low quality of it all. Most people have the information consumption habits equal to eating junk food for every meal and yet they have the gumption to pretend they're mighty intellectuals on the mountain barking wisdom to us idiots below because they falsely assume consuming carefully crafted fiction designed to sell is some strange esoteric intellectual pursuit. No, its the kid reading some tech manual and building something original who's doing something intellectual and esoteric, not the girl downing Hunger Games, Twilight, and Divergent trilogies on the bus and giving snide looks to the "nerds" around her who don't get "literature." Then she goes from the bus to the boob/youtube and zones out for hours until bedtime then back to work/school. That's a sad life and if you're honest with yourself, you'd agree with me.
She ended The Hundred Years war. She stopped a great many other people from suffering and dying. Her fame does not make her suffering "worse" than what she stopped. France was an occupied land. It was an ugly era that she put an end to.
I'm not sure exactly what the correction that you're supposed to be issuing is. He cited the buddhists, not Buddha, and you say right away that "there's a huge gap between what Buddha saw and taught and what is said by the teachings in modern Buddhism." What is your objection, exactly?
That modern Buddhists don't have the correct teaching - so they are not right as stated. We shouldn't say that truth can change (as implied by the statement everything changes except change) as when truth changes it's not truth anymore.
If you are getting antsy, you should, of course, play Space Engine! It's the ultimate exploration game. It aims to be a complete, accurate simulation of space, and you can download it for free. Of course, it's riddled with bugs, but it is absolutely worth playing anyway.
What makes you think you know what's best for him? I guess you probably went to college, but maybe you didn't. What I do know, is that you didn't both go to college and also choose not to go to college.
If you did go, then you don't know what would've happened to you if you hadn't gone. You could have lived in Costa Rica for 3 years and decided to establish a charity, never thinking twice about the value of higher education. Maybe later you would've posted in this thread, and had the top rated comment about how much you learned on that trip in comparison to what your friends learned in college.
However, it's also possible that you didn't go to college, and are simply regretting that choice and trying to warn those younger than you not to make the choice that you did. But what if you had gone? Maybe you would've hated it, and dropped out after two years, thinking it was a completely horrible idea.
Whether or not you went to college, you don't have the full picture. You don't know what it would've been like to do the opposite. That's why this is not an easy question -- that's why people actually talk about this. If it were as easy as "I'm older than you, and I think you should go, therefore you should go," this thread wouldn't exist. So don't act like you have the right to tell others how to live very important parts of their lives. We all have to walk our own journey, and make our own decisions, and if we just listen to those more experienced than us, we will never get anywhere important. And we probably won't be very happy, either.
