“Tradition.”
The word whimpered weakly, like a small injured creature in the forest, inaudible unless you hold your breath. Words can do that. You may not hear them or, if you do, why hesitate, old notions and locutions are dying around us all the time. The past just slows you, the future’s what counts, forward!
Retired now, with time, I pause. Puppy Henry doesn’t mind. He romps wherever we are, as long as it’s outdoors. If he heard that little injured creature – a mouse, say – he’d devour it without sentiment. But he’s busy elsewhere.
The word has not vanished: the opposite, rather. It’s so overused these days we hardly hear it. AI rates it the 12,462nd most used word in English (I’m just making that up, but AI knows). In recipes, it evokes good old gramma in the kitchen; in sports, it’s applied with a sigh to depleted franchises and retiring heroes. It suggests yesteryear, the good old days, bygone, nothing current or potent, not a force to reckon with in noisy, jostling modernity.
Often mentioned, it is little taught.
This is a change. Tradition used to be a natural force. The past weighed heavily. In literature, my college concentration, we watched writers wrestling it. A famous essay by T.S. Eliot called “Literature and the Individual Talent” stirred debate. His assertion was bold, infuriating to some:
if we approach a poet without … prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.
So much for the creative genius! Artists, in Eliot’s thesis, were conduits for the past. Super-critic Harold Bloom published a big book called The Anxiety of Influence, which depicted writers in a tormented tussle with their forebears. (That image suited me fine.)
What changed? What caused “tradition” to dwindle into sepia sentimentality, no longer a force of nature?
The past is what we make of it. Henry makes little of it because it seems not to occur to him. The future, likewise, doesn’t worry him much.
The syllabi of the nineteenth and most of the twentieth century focused heavily on the past – the humanities, history, classics, predecessors – “the best,” in Matthew Arnold’s famous formulation, “which has been thought and said in the world.” STEM rules today’s curricula – Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math – how to do things now and tomorrow, with nary a rearward glance. Capitalism favors the new, which it can peddle, as opposed to the past, which we’ve already purchased: there’s less profit in recycling.
The less we think about the past, the less it matters, the more arrogant we become about our importance in the here and now. We see this in our politics, where few seem to know or care why our forefathers made America as they did. Ignorance shrugs off the sickening example of Weimar Germany – Hitler “can’t happen here, are you kidding!” The same willful oblivion affects education, as humanities and classics departments shrink or shutter.
I prefer to live in a present enriched by yesterday, to view myself as a tiny soldier in an infinite parade, to respect my ancestors and wrestle them to build my strength. Everything I do and think, like the brook beside my window, flows from earlier and will dissolve into larger waters. I hold with Isaac Newton, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
This bias is quaintly old-fashioned.