Respect the Classics

Despite much difference in our thinking that seems, at least at this point, pretty non-transcendable, I can't say that my mother never offered good advice. Never solicited but hey-if people knew exactly what kind of advice they needed all the time and had the strength of will to follow it all the time then they wouldn't be people-they would be Gods. One of the few things my mother tried very hard to instill in me that I never fought the least bit, but merely assimilated for what I took to be its imminent merit, was this..."Respect the Classics! Your teachers wouldn't encourage you to read them because they are content to keep you as stupid as possible without playing too fast and loose with their funding, their bullet-point curricula, or their absurd "everyone's already essentially good enough" values." Surely the best of maternal intentions are visible here, but I've only recently found an answer for myself to the "why..." of the "respect" that doesn't simply boil down to "My mother's advice is usually good [a faulty premise to be as charitable as possible]" or "Because I just love them so much [a vapid appeal to sentiment when I know that I could somehow 'do better'].

I can't tell you why I despise the thought of a life lived in complete ignorance of "The Classics" without giving some notion of what I think makes a "Classic," because that's gotta be something pretty gnarly if I'm to justify my use of the big "C." To my mind, a classic is a classic not because it is well-regarded by "all the right people" but because it has a certain inherent 'unstop-ability' to it. This is why Freddie Mercury embodies the essence of 'classic' rock and roll to me, everything about his presentation, performance, and composition is un-fucking-stoppable. A book deserving of being called a "Classic" could therefore only be so [to me, anyway] because it has the same quality of requiring absolutely no external promotion and only the smallest modicum of popularity at the time of publishing in order to be a "must-read." And why "must we read them?" You don't have to answer that fully to begin to see where I will be going with this. A small 'c' classic is somebody's ideal example of a given 'class,' and the 'class' that is embodied in a near-perfect form by the "big-C-classics" could easily be labeled: 'That class of artistic and intellectual achievements for which it is possible to suppose that human civilization will never be fully done digesting." By way of an example, I simply must give a link to a number from one of my very favorite musicals, if only to demonstrate that human civilization is no where NEAR "done" with even such a very old "Classic" as Plato's Republic.