Cultural Illiteracy?

Sunday, 2 October 2011 by Marcus Aquinas.

After a weekly trip to pick up the groceries, I sat on the patio with some fresh bread, a nice bit of cheese, and a little Chardonnay to enjoy the pleasant weather of an early autumn afternoon. For some odd reason, a piece of one of the better-known quatrains of FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was running through my head:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou

Not being content to dwell on that, I remembered a cartoon in Playboy, many years back. I forget the exact wording, but the gist was “the wine and bread are on the house, Omar, but ‘Thou’ is going to cost you.” You can probably fill in the picture without my having to describe it.

At any rate, keeping in mind that this cartoon appeared something like 30 or 40 years ago (time flies when you’re having fun), I wondered how many of our current college graduates would catch the joke? Granted, I was pretty well-read for a teenager, but it still makes me wonder.

Culture is about as malleable as anything else related to humans. Although I’m loth to adopt Newton’s “shoulders of giants” analogy, it’s nevertheless true that nothing develops in a vaccuum. Everything we have and do is either the result or a divergent offshoot of something prior. Do we, as the older generation, inflict our cultural norms and ideals upon the current generation because they are valuable in and of themselves or because it is supposed to help them understand the mindset from which we come? Perhaps both? Perhaps neither?

Cultural literacy, as I understand the term, is a sufficient foundation in the literature, philosophy, and the rest, of earlier generations such that one can understand without getting bogged down in idiom. But how much is “sufficient”? Yet another of those “makes me wonder” things. Perhaps more Chardonnay is in order.

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