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Pastimes : A CENTURY OF LIONS/THE 20TH CENTURY TOP 100 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Edwarda who wrote (1632)	11/15/1999 1:20:00 AM
From: Neocon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3246

I would like to raise the question of influence more explicitly, although I have referred to some of the difficulties before. When trying to determine influence, it is not a numbers game, for one thing. That can easily be seen in the fact that celebrity, which is about popularity, is often fleeting, and without lasting effects. Nor is it about inclusiveness, since we are not trying to apportion admiration or esteem, but judge effects. It is about searching for the historical center, the main line of narrative action, and looking for those who have most likely altered that main line pronouncedly through their actions, writing, inventions, oratory, whatever. It is about weighing the effects of their actions as best one can, not judging their character, but trying to decide, on balance, if the bad neutralized the good, or even outweighed it. If the fine arts are important, and the main story in art in this century is modernism, the movement towards stylization and abstraction, then I am more or less correct in my choices. If the dominant art form of this century has been film, then I have about the right number of directors, perhaps too few. If poetry has in fact become a minor literary form, than I may have too many poets, not too few. In any event, I am happy to confess that I think, pretty conventionally, that the main line of world history has occurred in Europe and America in this century, and that few on the periphery have had a chance yet to contribute decisively.....