He has long since ceased to be surprised at the range of ignorance of his students. Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, they might as well have been hatched from eggs yesterday.
I first read Allan Bloom's, The Closing of the American Mind, in the late eighties. It took me back to my first university year in the late sixties, where there was a compulsory subject called Humanities. Various academics would give a lecture on one of the book list. Essays followed, the usual scheme of things.
My father had a collection of tram stories. One told of a student from his former school who remained seated while he was standing. "What are you studying?" he asked the boy. "Science, sir". "Ahh", said by father, "I didn't think it was civics."
The language he draws on with such aplomb is, if he only knew it, tired, friable, eaten from the inside as if by termites. Only the monosyllables can still be relied on, and not even all of them.
j.m. coetzee - disgrace