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Life Sucks and Then You Die 266 Views


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Cute fuzzy puppies. Giggling babies. A huge sundae topped with fudge and whipped cream and... yeah. We just wanted to put a smile on your face, because the topic of this video sure won't do the trick.

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Transcript

00:07

Life Sucks, and Then You Die… or, How Modernists Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the World…

00:12

a la Shmoop The 1920s wasn’t one big flashy DiCaprio-does-Gatsby

00:18

party. If all the flappers and jazz is too much for you, the modernists are there to

00:22

harsh your buzz.

00:23

The modernist era was all about crises…

00:25

Crises of faith…

00:26

Crises of knowledge…

00:28

Crises of humanity…

00:30

These guys and gals thought the world was spinning out of control, and they saw humanity

00:33

at its most brutal. Care for a few examples?

00:36

ONE: Thomas Hardy thought the world was just a place of total empty randomness… a war

00:42

will do that to you, we guess.

00:43

TWO: George Santayana wasn't high on the world, either, but he insisted that poetry could

00:49

replace religion and make the world beautiful again.

00:52

Even the worst poetry would be a step up from trench warfare and mustard gas.

00:58

THREE: T.S. Eliot took another route: he thought that we should draw on the classic art of

01:06

our past to make sense of our present-day world.

01:09

Today, this would be like invoking the Smurfs and Transformers to make sense of our world.

01:14

Hooray for Hollywood. Three guys, three different opinions. It might

01:18

all sound like the modernists were just coming up with creative ways to dodge reality…

01:27

But a poet like Wallace Stevens tried to show us that pretty much all of our experience

01:31

is made up by our imaginations anyway. The question is, what do we do with our imaginations?

01:39

Do we use them to make bombs, or to write stories and poems that’ll make our daily

01:44

lives feel more beautiful? With all these different opinions floating

01:47

around, you'd think there wasn't just one right answer. And guess what? That's what

01:51

yet another Modernist thought.

01:53

William Faulkner argued that you couldn’t really believe in one true perspective.

01:57

Instead, the modern world was all about the fragmentation of human bonds.

02:05

In other words, without a common religion to follow, everyone was just left to their

02:08

own perspective, turning the world into one big Choose Your Own Adventure book.

02:13

So not only was the world fragmented, but people’s perspectives were fragmented too.

02:18

How did these guys run a society when everyone had their own take on what’s right and wrong?

02:24

Shmoop amongst yourselves.

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