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Life Sucks and Then You Die 266 Views
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Description:
Cute fuzzy puppies. Giggling babies. A huge sundae topped with fudge and whipped cream and... yeah. We just wanted to put a smile on your face, because the topic of this video sure won't do the trick.
Transcript
- 00:07
Life Sucks, and Then You Die… or, How Modernists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the World…
- 00:12
a la Shmoop The 1920s wasn’t one big flashy DiCaprio-does-Gatsby
- 00:18
party. If all the flappers and jazz is too much for you, the modernists are there to
- 00:22
harsh your buzz.
- 00:23
The modernist era was all about crises…
Full Transcript
- 00:25
Crises of faith…
- 00:26
Crises of knowledge…
- 00:28
Crises of humanity…
- 00:30
These guys and gals thought the world was spinning out of control, and they saw humanity
- 00:33
at its most brutal. Care for a few examples?
- 00:36
ONE: Thomas Hardy thought the world was just a place of total empty randomness… a war
- 00:42
will do that to you, we guess.
- 00:43
TWO: George Santayana wasn't high on the world, either, but he insisted that poetry could
- 00:49
replace religion and make the world beautiful again.
- 00:52
Even the worst poetry would be a step up from trench warfare and mustard gas.
- 00:58
THREE: T.S. Eliot took another route: he thought that we should draw on the classic art of
- 01:06
our past to make sense of our present-day world.
- 01:09
Today, this would be like invoking the Smurfs and Transformers to make sense of our world.
- 01:14
Hooray for Hollywood. Three guys, three different opinions. It might
- 01:18
all sound like the modernists were just coming up with creative ways to dodge reality…
- 01:27
But a poet like Wallace Stevens tried to show us that pretty much all of our experience
- 01:31
is made up by our imaginations anyway. The question is, what do we do with our imaginations?
- 01:39
Do we use them to make bombs, or to write stories and poems that’ll make our daily
- 01:44
lives feel more beautiful? With all these different opinions floating
- 01:47
around, you'd think there wasn't just one right answer. And guess what? That's what
- 01:51
yet another Modernist thought.
- 01:53
William Faulkner argued that you couldn’t really believe in one true perspective.
- 01:57
Instead, the modern world was all about the fragmentation of human bonds.
- 02:05
In other words, without a common religion to follow, everyone was just left to their
- 02:08
own perspective, turning the world into one big Choose Your Own Adventure book.
- 02:13
So not only was the world fragmented, but people’s perspectives were fragmented too.
- 02:18
How did these guys run a society when everyone had their own take on what’s right and wrong?
- 02:24
Shmoop amongst yourselves.
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