Worth Pondering - Zia Mohyeddin

I am a classicist which means that I belong to a minority that keeps whispering in the corner of a world which is full of strident noises that drown all our efforts. I believe that the creations that derive from the past should be enjoyed and understood. I believe that Dickens and Chekhov and Ghalib and Sarshar shall give us pleasure. What we need is not just to preserve the old masters but the capacity to enjoy and understand them. If the capacity is lost the printed words would turn to stone, sink down into museums, and die. The past is our future.

What do I whisper about? What have I got? Not much really, apart from a little knowledge about books and plays and tunes and a little skill in their interpretation. It is because I cannot sit alone with my books and tunes that I feel I must communicate what has been communicated to me. I inherit a tradition which has lasted hundreds of years. And yet those I come across don't want to have anything to do with this tradition. When I say good taste matters I am dubbed as an elitist.

Ought I to bother them? Ought I to interrupt their endless talk about the dwindling prices of their property, their pre-occupation with Bingo and cut-price Umra tickets, and say Sophocles and Dante and Maupassant await you? But who am I that I should worry them? People are indifferent to the aesthetic products of the past.

Culture is a forbidding word but one has to use it, knowing of none better, to describe the beautiful and interesting objects which men have made in the past and handed down to us.

So here goes: the aesthete in me cries out for better work, more chiselled, more refined, but the torrential darkness of my environment thwarts my faculties compelling me to lay everything to rest and be submerged in the cold darkness of the times we live in.