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28 March 2005: Today a quick opinion about the interestingness of writers. Someone on the internet--no, it was a reviewer in The New Criterion, I believe, panned writers in general for so often writing about . . . writers. The reviewer declared that writers are no more important and therefore worthy of being written about than plumbers or sales clerks. I disagree. Writers rise above most others because they are representative human beings and because their deeds are permanent, or intended to be so, and concerned with Higher Things. By the latter, I mean the Search for Truth and/or the Pursuit of Beauty, which--in my philosophy--are higher than survival and comfort. By "representative human beings," I (not too coherently) mean someone who represents mankind as a being in the cosmos as opposed to someone just mowing a lawn or signing a receipt. We become the writers we read, we don't become the guy who made our automobile. Hence, writers are naturally going to seem more important to us that factory workers.
I now leave this subject feeling I've not done it justice, but made a start I hope others will help me with. One thing more: I no doubt egocentrically believe that the best history plays and novels of our time will not be about political and military figures of our day but about artistic and scientific figures. Amadeus, for example.
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