The Inklings were different. They clung by their fingernails to the past, to old languages and old books and old-school habits and values. They could be cranky geezers — beer drinkers who wore tweed, refused to admit women to their ranks and recited Anglo-Saxon poetry for fun. They expected to be ever-more marginalized and sneered at, although they did fight like hell to keep Oxford from updating its syllabus to included such new-fangled entertainments as Victorian novels. Still, they assumed that they’d lose eventually. They were so unfashionable! So how did they end up taking over popular culture?
English: Picture of the corner of the Eagle and Child pub, en Oxford (England), where the Inklings met (1930-1950). Español: Fotografía de la esquina del pub Eagle and Child en Oxford (Inglaterra), donde los Inklings se reunían (1930-1950). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
No one wanted Star Wars when George Lucas started shopping it to studios in the mid-1970s. It was the era of Taxi Driver and Network and Serpico; Hollywood was hot for authenticity and edgy drama, not popcorn space epics. But that was only part of the problem.
The reasons for that low number are, I guess, the same as your reasons for reading fewer books than you think you should have read last year: I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs. It just seems such an awful lot of words to concentrate on, on their own, without something else happening. And once you’ve finished one chapter, you have to get through another one. And usually a whole bunch more, before you can say finished, and get to the next. The next book. The next thing. The next possibility. Next next next.
Space is uniquely difficult for us to wrap our heads around. It’s bigger, by many orders of magnitude, than anything we ever experience firsthand, and involves processes that unfold over the course of billions of years. One thing that can help you visualize space is maps and graphics like these — images that capture the diversity, the strangeness, and, above all, the vastness of the universe around us.
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