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Originals and Copies
- University of Michigan Press
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Originals and Copies The opening of every new academic year inevitably makes me think of myself as a college student, aching with vague hopes and apprehensions, uncertain ofwhat my calling in life might be, yearning for a great cause on which to focus my energies. My own college years were during the Eisenhower administrationwhen television was still in black and white and the uniform of business was the gray flannel suit. A prominent book of the period was a collection of introspective essays by college students, entitled The Unsilent Generation -the self-portrait of a generation that was sharply criticized for its lack ofidealism. A pervasive grayness hung over many of us-a fine silt of ennui that filtered into our dreams, dulled our sense of adventure, and dimmed our inchoate aspirations. "Godless Communism," as it then was called, was the enemy, and after the protracted stalemate of Korea, it seemed likely that the cold war would go on forever-especially after Soviet tanks, in the fall of my senior year, crushed the brave hopes of the Hungarian freedom fighters. In defying the tyranny of the Soviet Union, those young people were the international heroes of my time, just as Lech Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and the courageous Chinese students of Tiananmen Square have been of recent years. But apart from those freedom fighters, we did not have any heroes of our own-and that, I think now, was part of our problem. We thought of ourselves as living in a postheroic age, a time not of heroes but of antiheroes-diminished, Kafkaesque figures whose brooding alienation and misunderstood sensitivities expressed the shrinking limits of the human condition. We saw our world reflected in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. Our novelists were Albert Camus and J. D. Salinger; our filmmakers, Ingmar Bergman and Fran~ois Truffaut; our playwrights, Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee; our philosophers, Reinhold Niebuhr and Jean-Paul Sartre; our cartoonists, Jules Feiffer and Walt Kelly; our best-selling manuals ofcultural analysis, The Organization Man and The Lonely Crowd. Looming over us as a popular icon was the tormented figure of James Dean, dead in his twenties, forever inseparable from the existential role he played in the movie Rebel Without A Cause. 149 150 Idealism and Liberal Education Now I wonder: what will today's college students look back on and identify, twenty or thirty years hence, as the formative influences on their own personal, intellectual, and social development? What influential books, what heroic figures, what great causes will they remember from their undergraduate years? In his 1972 gathering of essays, Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling quotes a plaintive query by the eighteenth-century poet Edward Young: "Born Originals," Young asks, "how comes it to pass that we die Copies?" It is difficult for anyone, in an age of "Copies," to remain an "Original ." Clearly it takes more than a formal curriculum to nourish within us an authentic sense of our being. At every stage of our development, in order to stimulate our moral and intellectual growth, we require the immediacy of human models. That is what Bernard Malamud must have meant when he wrote in The Natural, his haunting fable ofa superachieving baseball star, "Without heroes, we're all plain people and don't know how far we can go." The lives and works of three people have made them exemplars for me. All three happen to be Southerners: the first, a Mississippian, Eudora Welty; the second, an Alabamian, Hugo LaFayette Black; the third, a Georgian, Martin Luther King, Jr. In contemplating the lives and accomplishments of each of these three people-an imaginative writer, a passionate judge, and a transforming moral leader-one can see an "Original " character working out its own destiny. One is awed by their achievements. And one is prompted to search for the hidden roots of their creativity, the mysterious springs that fed their extraordinary capacity for lifelong growth and development, the inner resources that allowed them to transcend the confining limits of time and of place. My first exemplar is Eudora Welty, whose greatness as a writer rests, in large measure, on the intensity of her experiences and observations, as both a Southerner and a woman. In work after amazing work-I think of the stories "Death of a Traveling Salesman," "Why I Live at the P.O.," "Livvie," and "A Worn Path," as well as such novels as The Robber Bridegroom , Delta Wedding, and The...