Books that you found oddly depressing

[Anonymous No.7375263]

I'm reading Jacques Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence" and it kind of depresses me for the following reasons:

1. It's mainly an overview of currents in Western European culture and thought, and tends to briefly cite various authors and historical figures before moving on to the next epoch. He had clearly been reading incessantly from youth until the time he wrote the book (it was published when he was 93), and it's very clear just from his outline that I will never even become familiar with a fragment of the canonical classics before I die. There's too much material.

2. As a Frenchman, he refers promiscuously to the difficulties of translation or cultural understanding between Gallic and Anglo societies. He notes that a lot of aphorisms are basically untranslatable. I would have to study French for a lot longer in order to attain that level of competence. That's probably not going to happen.

3. The book shifts sometime around the 1890's and then the immediate prewar era. We go from a progression of visual art from sloppy perspectival nonsense to photorealism but then into fucking cubism and abstract bullshit. His overt narrative is not one of cultural decline, really, but it's difficult to interpret things any other way. He traces the same evolution with classical music and literature itself. The ascent ended a long time ago, didn't it?

It's a well-written overview, though he skips a lot of material and over-emphasizes certain historical figures.

But at the end of it, I did not feel good at all about the broad direction of western societies.

[Anonymous No.7375278]

>>7375263
Watch Midnight in Paris. Everyone at every time thinks the past was far more romantic than it really was.
If you were born 200-300 years ago what chance do you really think you'd ever get of knowing of the arts let alone read/participate in them?

[Anonymous No.7375298]

>>7375278
Well that relates to general standards of living; the book is more concerned with cultural history itself. "Abstraction" becomes a sort of retreat from traditional standards once the material to be produced within those standards is largely exhausted. That sort of thing.

Note - that's not an argument he makes openly, but it's one I gather from what he wrote.

[Anonymous No.7375511]

>>7375298
I disagree with the notion that academic realism was exhausted. There was a conscious shift away from it, but there are artists who are still familiar with its vernacular, although they don't win million dollar commissions and prestigious prizes.

[Anonymous No.7375522]

>>7375263
I intend to create a "Doomsayer" reading chart with various books about decadence and declining of civilizations.

Do you think this book fits the bill?

[Anonymous No.7375538]

>>7375522
Only in its final 150 pages or so (the main text minus references and forewords is about 800 pages long). Before that, it's a story of western ascent.

He's also not really acting directly as a diagnostician of western decline, though he traces the social evolution of western culture up INTO what can only be read as its decline.

[Anonymous No.7375542]

/his/