A truly great essay ....

... Joseph Epstein on T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture.

In his criticism, Eliot wrote much that was prophetic of the age in which we now live. As early as the 1920s, he remarked “on the vague jargon of our time, when we have a vocabulary for everything and exact ideas about nothing.” He foresaw the rise of “the half-formed science [of] psychology, [which] conceals from both writer and reader the utter meaninglessness of a statement.” He anticipated the loss of authority of universities in the intellectual life of England and America: “They have too long lost any common fundamental assumption as to what education is for, and they are too big. It might be hoped that they would eventually follow, or else be relegated to preservation as curious architectural remains; but they cannot be expected to lead.”