Shopping period is my favorite part of each semester. In the last two weeks I have heard lectures on the Haitian revolution, the structure of the neuron, the first two lines of the Tao Te Ching, and the agnosticism of Anne Bradstreet.
The sheer breadth of human knowledge is both inspiring and intimidating. There is so much to know!
Yet once I observe, as I do each semester, that there is "so much" out there, it begs the question: How much is too much?
My answer: it's enough already.
Therefore, I hereby enact a moratorium on all academic and artistic production. For the next, say, five years, no one shall produce a great work of poetry, or sculpture, or social criticism. This will give us, the audience, a chance to catch up.
I do not hate art. Far from it. I love art-so much, in fact, that I want to digest as much of it as I can. But there just isn't time. Consider film, the fast food of cultural consumption. At this rate, five movies I want to see are released for every one I do see. I've only watched "Singin' In the Rain" twice, and could easily rent it twice more; I still haven't seen "Apocalyse Now." Then consider books, which take more than two or three hours to absorb.
We don't have to stop producing everything during the next five years. People are welcome to keep making food, for example. I'll even allow the nuts and bolts of academia to continue - Gregory Mankiw may revise his economics textbook during the moratorium, and I suppose we can go forward with things like stem cell research if we must. Even within the arts, exceptions can be made. Hollywood can go on adapting comic books willy-nilly; David Banner can release ten albums, or even start a clothing line for all I care. A few newspapers will be allowed to stay in print (though the magazine sections, unfortunately, will have to go).
I think we can all agree that we need a break. The profusion of high culture has gotten out of hand. When the Incas came up with a writing system, they probably just intended to pass notes to each other:
"Hey, how are the mass sacrifices in your neck of the woods?"
"Leave some barley in a barrel for a few months and then drink it. Just trust me."
What would they say if they knew that we were now using written language to bury ourselves in books most of us will never even hear of, much less read?
Five or six centuries ago, a member of the leisure class could hope to stay abreast of most of the scholarship and art produced in the (known) world. It's bad enough that this is no longer the case; must we compound the problem? Today we proliferate knowledge at an unprecedented rate. We are not merely stacking facts and theories in a neat arithmetic pile; we are on the upward slope of a parabola. We are Hercules fighting the Hydra: every time we put one school of thought to bed, two arise in its place. The writer Robert Anton Wilson argues that in the time between the birth of Jesus and birth of Leonardo, the total amount of information in the world doubled once. It is now doubling every eighteen months or so.
Enough already!
Remember the Twilight Zone episode where Burgess Meredith is the last man in the world, and he has all the time he has always wanted to read, read, read, until the twist ending? (I won't spoil the surprise, but it has to do with zombies.) This episode proved two things: a) the Twilight Zone is the greatest show ever, and b) nuclear winter has its advantages.
Under my moratorium plan, we get all the advantages of the apocalypse without the collateral damage. We get five years to crack the books we haven't read, the albums we haven't really listened to and the galleries we haven't visited.
Five years isn't enough, but it will make a dent. And maybe it will also teach us the value of economy. When the wheels of cultural production are allowed to turn once more, perhaps hyper-prolific artists - Joyce Carol Oates, I'm looking in your direction - will stop crowding the floor and take a page out of Elliott Smith's book: create a couple of masterpieces and then kill yourself. It will make things easier for the rest of us.
Andrew Marantz '06.5 sleeps on a pile of ripped up New Yorker back issues.
