Stranger on Earth

Good god, is nothing sacred anymore? I was browsing on Goodreads when I came across the following comments (most probably from a teenager) about Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa (1937), the mother of all memoirs: I have no idea why my mom recommended this book to me. A white British colonist tells the story of her privileged life on her coffee plantation in Kenya. She writes some great imagery about the Kenyan landscape and tells funny stories about animals, except that her idea of the landscape and animals includes all the Black servants and workers and "squatters" on her plantation. She is really stupid and proudly naive. It's awful. For example, when she jokingly threatens to fire all of her servants if they don't find this cute baby antelope she saw while on an outing, she thinks it's out of love for her that they spend all night searching for it. How darling of them! I think you're supposed to find her some sort of feminist heroine because she...

Dear Herr Hesse, I know you’ve been dead since 1962, a good ten years before I was born, and my writing to you may come across as a mad gesture the likes of which only the overly obsessed are capable of. I can assure you I’m not mad, even though everyone around me is. I’ve just finished reading your 1919 novel Demian , which you wrote when you’re on the brink of madness (Was the war that bad? Why did all those young men have to die?), and which made you what my generation calls an “overnight sensation” among the disillusioned young. Before I started reading the book, I’d wondered why it’d had such an effect on the young men of the 1910s (and also those of the following decades). It’s just a book, I thought. Aren’t we exaggerating? But I should’ve known. Your Siddhartha has after all been my personal guide since I first read it in 2004, so why should this one be made of lesser stuff? The actor/scholar James Franco, a young(ish) man of my generation, wrote a new introduc...

Almost half a lifetime went by between the compositions of “When You Are Old” and “Politics,” and yet it is startlingly clear from the diction of both poems that their writer, whose focus might have shifted from the personal to the political, was as preoccupied with the subject of (lost) youth in his last days as when he was in his thirties.   When You Are Old (from The Rose , 1893) When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. In “When You Are Old,” the speaker is addressing a wo...

Note: This is an entry I wrote as far back as 2010, as a response to the youthful naivete I was witnessing all around me regarding certain political issues. The entry appeared on my old blog, but is new to this one. My views on the subject have only altered very slightly since. Being a high-school teacher means that I get to hang around doe-eyed teenagers and observe their behaviour up close. Over the years I have seen all colours and shades, but the one thing that stands out for me is definitely the teenage brand of idealism. This particular brand is different from yours and mine; it is one that has an unstoppable energy and an inflammatory dose of self-conviction, chiefly derived from a one-dimensional, monochromatic outlook of the world. If this sounds patronising, it is because there is no other way to describe its crookedness. Most young people are in need of conviction, some form of belief, no matter how unreasonable, to lean on during a period in their lives when uncer...

It may be superfluous to stipulate that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s debut This Side of Paradise (1920) is still remarkably relevant to our times, but a valid idea bears repeating, and those who have enjoyed and witnessed Fitzgerald’s literary finesse in this challenging first work would most certainly not mind being reminded of exactly why this novel, published almost a century ago now, still reflects our youths today. This Side of Paradise (a phrase derived from Rupert Brooke’s poem “Tiare Tahiti”) concerns Amory Blaine, a Princetonian convinced of his own intellectual brilliance (“Amory wondered how people could fail to notice that he was a boy marked for glory…” [19]), but never quite finding his niche, stumbling from one love affair to another, perennially wondering what life has in store for an exceptional mind like his. During the course of the novel, he removes himself from the highly regulated world of his mother’s, seeks knowledge in literary classics, makes fair-weather ...