Of worms and chaff

Who could ever forget those golden words of Tyler Durden , “You are not a unique snowflake; we are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world.” The brilliant soap manufacturing modern revolutionary of Fight Club fame got it right in many ways… I wish I could leave it at that. OK, let me play genie and just leave it at that (for now). C.S. Lewis, in his essay Lilies that fester speaks with unabashed repugnance (quite rightly so) about culture -mongers who are so caught up in being “cultured” that there is no real acknowledgement of a Don Giovanni or the Orestaia but just some feigned rubbish worth less than nothing. Culture, in CSL’s England was the collective term for a whole set of “certain very valuable activities” like appreciating (or feigning to appreciate) literature or the arts. It was something, in a sense, attainable. But travel half way around the world and one realizes the multiplicity of the English language. “Culture” means something seemingly completely unrelated