Desiccated Minds in Shrunken Age

[Vung Tau, 8/10/26]

In Joyce’s “The Dead,” the protagonist, Gabriel, hesitates about quoting Robert Browning to his dinner speech audience, but Shakespeare lines are fine. Such a world only disappeared decades after that story’s publication, with TV, movies and the internet hastening its demise. We’re not talking about society as it existed in 1914, but centuries of cultural heritage, simply evaporated. Before the present, even savages were more knowledgeable, fond of and conversant about the past, through orally transmitted tales and poems. Now, the average dork can’t remember what happened last week, or just minutes ago. His mind can only contain half a dozen idiotic songs plus two or three TikTok skits. Even older farts, supposedly more grounded, cite only movies and songs to impress or make a point. At least they can string together more sentences, purportedly, than a gorilla.

At the very beginning of modernity more than a century ago, Gabriel already lamented cultural collapse, “We are living in a sceptical and, if I may use the phrase, a thought-tormented age: and sometimes I fear that this new generation, educated or hypereducated as it is, will lack those qualities of humanity, of hospitality, of kindly humour which belonged to an older day. Listening tonight to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we were living in a less spacious age.” Minds were already contracting.

The main thrust of “The Dead,” though, isn’t mental decay but how deceptive are all aspects of society, for it’s made up of desperately performing individuals. Even spouses can’t quite know each other. Clumsily I touched on this even before the latest disclosure from my buddy, Jonathan, who showed up in Vũng Tàu yesterday, and is already gone. Like us all, he’s just a ghost flitting through.