and what has been done
is what will be done;
there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is,
“See, this is new”?
It has already been,
in the ages before us.”
- Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
Every day I begin my English classes with a famous quotation. Lately, we've been looking at what figures like Oscar Wilde, Goethe, C.S. Lewis, and Thoreau have to say about originality.
“Most people,” Wilde says, “are other people, their thoughts are the opinions of others, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation,” and most of my students are inclined to agree. They've already been primed with Goethe (“all truly wise thoughts have been thoughts a thousand times already”) and Lewis on the subject, and I think I've fairly convinced them that the themes of human literature and thought are few: love for country, brother, nature, woman, and God, hatred of oppressors, enemies, death, and decay, and desire for immortality, honor, and self-knowledge.
While the list isn't exhaustive, it is startlingly close to being so. No work that is founded on a so-called “unique” idea will ever be great, principally because the great ideas have all been ideas “a thousand times already.”
Of course, it's obvious that Wilde isn't really on the same side of this debate as Lewis or Goethe. While he too admits that there is very little about mankind and our thoughts that can be called revolutionary or unique, this thought isn't the comfort for him that it is for Lewis; rather, it seems to actually disgust him. I'd be tempted to accuse Wilde of a “poor me” attitude, and of entertaining the misconception that he was the first and only homosexual writer to aspire to greatness, but I know he was better-read than that.
Personally, I think more people's passions should be a quotation. My personal passion would probably come from Ecclesiastes, A Midsummer Night's Dream, or the work of Emily Dickinson. Mimicry, in fact, is one of the best habits we can acquire: whether it be of our national heroes, of the saints, of great authors or thinkers, or even of Christ himself, we need models.
My students' final and most desperate plea toward original thinking went something like this: “What about politicians? Shouldn't they be original thinkers? The problems they have to deal with are all new. The oil crisis, atomic warfare, terrorism, the internet- it's all new.”
After reminding them of the striking resemblance that JFK's “Inaugural Address,” which we recently read in class, bears to Barrack Obama's speech at the DNC a couple weeks ago, I told them this:
“Heaven help us if the people running this country are original thinkers. My ideas, even my best ones, have only been churning around in my head for five or six years, yours have only had two or three years. At best, an original thinker has had a decade or two of rolling over the same thoughts. Shakespeare has had over three hundred years, Lincoln over a hundred, Homer over three thousand. If I were to teach you only from my own thoughts, I would have exhausted them about two and a half weeks ago. None of us has a long enough lifetime to comprehend the great truths. Heaven help us if we tried.”
Tomorrow I'm going to use the above quotation from Ecclesiastes, we'll see how they respond.
Let me know what you think.
