May 28, 2024
whew–! just finished jaques barzun’s from dawn to decadence: 500 years of western cultural life and it certainly lives up to its name, successfully traversing the scale of the past five hundred years in the west with a very light tread; of course, little depth is reached but for barzun’s extraction of central themes which run through these times, but the book is already some 800 pages long – this is a necessity. technically, that which impressed me the most was the skill with which he would run through ideas and trends, providing a rich paragraph that alone could spark a thesis; it is the sort of work which only the skilled can do, and jaques, nearing the end of his life and culmination of his research, did it beautifully. barzun is certainly a conservative which is well-suited for this topic, but his bias toward the modern age’s spread of sin model other writers’ despairing at their times – i am curious how he did not check himself on the work of others here? it is difficult to believe that our age is a step change from those which came before.
regardless, i am awestruck in several ways by the book; first and foremost the immense foundation the cultural conception of the west rests on. montaigne, rousseau, toqueville, etc. are familiar to me; luther and calvin a little less so due to being brought up jewish, but as we go back in time there are a litany who i have not yet had the opportunity to get to know (even the former authors are ones which i would like to know more about – montaigne’s essays are on my to-read list). how difficult it is to gain a grasp of all of these; one could spend a lifetime in the past. furthermore, these lives were far richer than the few lines barzun can afford; so much is lost in compression. finally, these giants become more intimately human when examined, their lofty achievements following their past, facing the same issues of the human condition as the rest of us. so much is shaped by material circumstance, yes, but in retrospect their choices too make them. it’s banal, but that a common thread of humanity with the same fears and pleasures of the days links us with the past provides some comfort to me. altogether, a very human book.