It has been a wearisome week at The Inquirer. There is a buyout offer on the table and quite a few people have signed up for it. People I have worked with for 20 years and more are planning to exit. And no one can really say for sure what things will be like when it's all over -- except that it won't be the same.
And so, after a couple of very long days, I shall confine my blogging to noting that on this day, in 1903, Evelyn Waugh was born. Here is a fine piece on him by George Weigel. And this, from my favorite among his novels, Brideshead Revisited, nicely summarizes how I have been feeling of late:
How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation, Dresden figures of pastoral gaiety! Our wisdom, we prefer to think, is all of our own gathering, while, if the truth be told, it is, most of it, the last coin of a legacy that dwindles with time.
Not me. I'd have hung around at the Alamo. I guess I'm betting I'll still be involved with books and I want to be involved in whatever newspapers end up morphing into. Also, I have the job of a lifetime. There are readers, freelancers, schools, museums, libraries and other institutions I feel an obligation toward. You just can't walk away from that.
ReplyDeleteI'm also an incurable optimist, the kind of guy who sees every challenge as an opportunity. If the pros start walking out on newspapers now they'll have no one but themselves to blame if newspapers die or become something unrecognizable. In short, I plan to stick it out for a few more years, if permitted to.
As for the Waugh quote, a similar thought crossed my mind when I plugged it in. But it served my purpose. It reflected how I felt -- for I think it has more to so with conveying a mood of melancholy than anything else -- though what he is saying, as I understand it, is that we think we have earned our wisdom, when in fact the little we end up with tends to be at the bottom of a coffer we inherited from others. (I also think the Sword of Honor trilogy is simply magnificent -- but maybe what I need right now is The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.)