I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
Interpretation
The quote reflects skepticism about the positive aspects of American culture and questions the future of aesthetic appreciation.
In this quote, Philip Roth expresses his disillusionment with American culture, suggesting that he struggles to identify any uplifting qualities within it. His statement about aesthetic literacy points to a broader concern regarding the value placed on art and beauty in society, implying that such appreciation may diminish over time in America.
In practice
This quote can be used during a discussion on the state of modern art in America.
American society [...] not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possession, money, property--on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success.
I have a slogan I use when I get anxious writing, which happens quite a bit: ‘the ordeal is part of the commitment.’ It’s one of my mantras. It makes a lot of things doable.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.
It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.
That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.
Things happen to us in unpredictable ways, but the effect that that has on the kind of people who we become actually is not only open to chance - we can influence it in pretty profound ways.
Death is an ascension to a better library.
To test a perfect theory with imperfect instruments did not impress the Greek philosophers as a valid way to gain knowledge.
Tea is nought but this: first you heat the water, then you make the tea. Then you drink it properly. That is all you need to know.
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
We must have a real living determination to reach holiness. ''I will be a saint'' means I will despoil myself of all that is not God; I will strip my heart of all created things; I will live in poverty and detachment; I will renounce my will, my inclinations, my whims and fancies, and make make myself a willing slave to the will of God.
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