Long Way 'Round

Late last week, someone left a kitten at the church doorstep. My knowledge of movies suggested the foundling should have been a baby, but the cat food, carrier and quite friendly animal proved otherwise. We called animal control -- which the cat's previous owner apparently lacked the gumption to do -- who came, picked up the cat, and found it a new home on a local dairy farm. I let my congregation know via Facebook, and signed off the story with a paraphrase from Shelley's Ozymandias: "Look on her works, ye mices, and despair!"

At least one person asked me if I knew the plural of mouse was "mice," not "mices," and I said I did, but "mices" scanned more like the original line: "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" Then I had to explain what "original line" I was talking about and direct them to the poem.

Now, I labor under the burden of a liberal arts education from a pretty snooty university -- if a 20-degree nose-tilt signifies Ivy League-level condescension, we manage about a 13 or 14 -- so I happen to have things like this rattling around inside my skull. And I know full well that a knowledge of early 19th-century sonnets is a definite sign of egg-headedness, not intellectual superiority. But it occurred to me that 50 or so years ago, a much larger segment of the population would have picked up the reference, and fewer people attended and graduated from college then than do so now.

That idea connected with another one -- last year, on a religion and the arts discussion board, I went around and around a couple of times with a guy about whether or not over-emphasis on things like movies, popular music and such crowded out time and energy spent on some of the true classics of literature, art and poetry. I'm not a one-or-the-other guy here; I'm as happy listening to Elmore James yowl about dusting his broom as to a Locatelli concerto grosso, depending on my mood. The discussion centered on the way Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight talked about the consequences of a life lived for vengeance. I said that you could definitely pick up some stuff worth thinking about on that issue from Nolan's sequel to Batman Begins, but not on the same level that you could by reading about Inspector Javert in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, and the emphasis that so many people put on the movie crowded out the chance to read the novel.

The other guy thought that was just fine, but I'm unsure. If we accept a shallower level of thought about stuff -- and ain't no way Nolan, who takes things like this more seriously than a whole lot of people making movies today do, digs as deep into this issue as does Les Miserables --  what will the people who follow us do? What will provoke their thoughts, and will those thoughts work as hard with the issue as we or the people who came before us did? I'd like to think so, but every time I do, I see another hit by Lady Gaga or another Saw sequel or another episode of Jersey Shore or the Real Housewives of someplace or other.

When college courses focus on comic books or Harry Potter books or any one of a thousand other pop ephemera (that I enjoy immensely), when will anyone get around to learning the material that, one or two generations back, inspired the people who created the ephemera?

No answers here, I guess, just a spell of tail-chasing sparked by an abandoned cat on our church porch and a poem that I may be the only one geeky enough to know. But for a twist, I'll point out that the line I quoted is part of an inscription on a gigantic statue mentioned  in Shelley's poem: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

But the statue has been broken by time, and forgotten; the base with its quote, the stumps of legs and the half-buried head are all that remain. Maybe that's the fate of the arts I've talked about, too. I'd hope not.