Puffin’s Place

With considerable pleasure, I am discovering a rebirth of interest in thinker and writer Lionel Trilling, the Columbia prof who actually thought we had an obligation to be intelligent.

If you do not remember this man, listen to the video below.

A recent issue of Newsweek included a terrific look back at the 50’s liberalism of which Trilling was probably the defining figure. As article author Jeremy McCarter points out:

Now, from New York Review Books, comes the grand prize. In 1950, Trilling—then a 45-year-old English professor at Columbia University—assembled 16 essays he’d written over the preceding few years, all unified by what he called “an abiding interest in the ideas of what we loosely call liberalism, especially the relation of these ideas to literature.” It was a characteristically mild way to describe a uniquely provocative book. For in “The Liberal Imagination,” Trilling didn’t confine the well-honed tools of his profession to the books under review. He showed how our creative life shapes our political life (and vice versa), and our sentiments shape our ideas (and vice versa), along the way forcing his fellow liberals to confront their blind spots and weaknesses. As the new edition demonstrates, he attained insights in this gutsy, far-seeing book that prove as urgent in the 21st century as they did in the middle of the 20th.

The magic of Trilling’s criticism is that he never went into a tiny room and examined a work in its splendid isolation. He was at least as interested in the movement of the collective mind over time as in the work itself. His sense of the surges and lapses of human cultureis both fascinating and instructive.

A special significant echo for me has always been Trilling’s short story “The Other Margaret” where a wealthy New Yorker discovers the nature of individual responsibility, with a little help from a poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins. How often do we fail to demand responsibility from others as a way to excuse ourselves?