I’ve lately developed an aversion to generalizations, but otoh, I’m wary of the “great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people” effect of focusing on situational, contingent, matters... without ideas, you drown in small-minded noise...
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The only way to square this circle is to think about the world in terms of epic content and structure. Epics combine the historicallly contingent specificity of people/events news-and-gossip thinking with the “greatness” of generalizable/universal ideas...
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But I am underwhelmed by the idea of epic content in the sense of say the Iliad for Europe. I mean something like looking for epic structure and content in *any* time or place.
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Analogy: Homer’s Ulysses is a Great Man, and the Odyssey becomes a Great Time (ie standard epic) partly by virtue of his presence in it.
But James Joyce’ Ulysses (I’m told) is about looking for the epic content in a banal day.
Homer Simpson is also epic content for the 90s.
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How do you train yourself to see the epic in the banal? To see “greatness” in anyone’s life (not in a valorizing sense but in a sense of exceptional content relative to generalizations)? How do you see epic history in a banal period that seems to rhyme with many like it?
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Epic is in many ways the wrong term. It has connotations of priceless value. It seems to be about greatness in people and events, but it’s the best we have. What I am pointing at is the gestalt of all the details that fall through the cracks of all the theories.
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Take the raw phenomenology of people/events, the “news”. Throw away everything “explained” by theories of history the way you would in multiple regression till you get to the residuals. The weight of significance and meaning in that residue, how do you tease that out?
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I think that’s what epic narratives do to history. Distill some sort of signature essence out of it. That but for anything/anyone/any time. Post-theory liminal perception or something. It’s a way of seeing and speaking that’s pure 200 proof historicity.
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“See the world in a grain of sand...eternity in an hour” I think refers to this kind of epic eye.
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I suspect this is why I’m obsessed with mediocrity. It seems like the right thing to study.
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Replying to
yes and no, what I am working towards wouldn't count as a generalization, but might scratch some of the same itches
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