The young man shook his head. The man sitting next to me got up and left. Their frustration was encouraging. It indicated that the love of knowledge has not died. It has had to find other ways to thrive, outside of universities, in the hands of the solitary reader.
Canonical literature is more often subversive of morality.
Rather it develops an intellectual or aesthetic acuity in the reader, not an ethical one. The fact is, I reflected, that for all of this strange concern that technology might pollute scholarship, the reality is that the damage has already been done by multiculturalism. Scholarship has been politicized but true art remains defiantly unadulterated. So as fellow Phi Beta Kappans clubbed an inanimate box to death with their hysterical fears, I became optimistic. The battle has shifted.