Once More, Liking Creeps

A thought crossed my mind while writing the title for this piece, that someone might take the view I am being self-serving. Not the reaction I intend. What has motivated this and my similar posts on (Another Terrible Person, Great Writer) this subject is the rising of our cancel culture. 

There are people who I would not want to spend time with, who I admire their work. Celine comes to mind first. There is Ernest Hemingway. 

I guess I came up at a time when we knew far less about authors than we do now. Ignorance created a dichotomy between creator and work.

I think the work is generally more important than the creator. What I might get out of biography is what pertains to them as creator. I would say that I have far more sympathy for Hemingway now than I did 40 years ago. Back then Kurt Vonnegut's Happy Birthday, Wanda June put a major dent into my appreciation of Hemingway. Now, I feel more for the man who put himself into a box of public perception.

As for Celine's anti-Semitism, I cannot wrap my head around anti-Semitism in general, let alone his.

Either people can rise above their weaknesses and imperfections and create an art that also raises humanity, or they cannot. If we cannot rise, then we might as well imitate the lemmings and jump off a cliff en masse.

Imposing our political/moral views on a work strikes me a resurgent Victorian primness, and as deadening as was the original Victorian morality. Art and religion both serve to expose our hypocrisy. Neutering that function leaves a culture unable to cope with its societal problems. It is too Panglossian for me.

Whoa, that is a long preamble to introduce How to Read Like A Human. Maybe too much caffeine? See, reading it, I think I found the formula for dealing with this divide between an artist unpopular for their lifestyle and the quality of their work:

The Talmud is filled not only with legal material (halakhah), but also story material (aggadah) which can help a student picture a face to go with the name, to think about a human being and not only an idea. In this cultural moment, many of us are trapped in a seemingly never-ending process of exiling our idols once we discover their faults. Common advice is to remember that our favorites are only human. When people say this, what they mean is to brace for inevitable shortcomings, not to let ourselves fall in love. Such cynicism shrinks our intellectual capacity as surely as it dims our emotional capacity.  It is better to remind ourselves that authors are human, and because of that truth we must learn to fall in love. Loving, we are able to keep their insights without demanding our own idea of perfection.

Like another Jew said, let them without sin cast the first stone.

sch 11/26