Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And even though the film had to be filmed on location in Spain, pretending to be revolutionary Russia, it was magical for the sheer sweep and tragedy and human resilience that it showed. The very way in which a work of literature or of cinematography could capture so much Still, I'm still amazed by that. And then there's also, in the spirit of recommending neglected classics, my favorite author.
My favorite author is now a late Canadian author by the name of Robertson Davies, who wrote novel after novel. in a mode that probably would get called magical realism, but is so much more. Roberson Davies was heavily influenced by Carl Jung and Jungian philosophy, but in literary form, he managed to create stories that blend the mythical, the mystical, and the brutally real to paint a picture of
Canada as he knew it, Europe as he knew it, and the world as he knew it. And he's most famous probably for the Deptford Trilogy, three novels in a series that are linked, and they're just masterful. If only there were more books like that.
Yes, it was an amazing beard. Very 19th century.
Well, it comes down to one word, and that one word is read. As a college teacher, I'm concerned about what I'm seeing unfolding before us, which is classes, not my classes, but classes in which students are asked to read very little and or maybe in some cases not at all, or snippets that they are provided digitally, those have their place and can be valuable.
But the task of sitting down with a book and absorbing its message, not agreeing with it necessarily, but taking in the implications, learning how to think within the categories and the values of the author is going to be irreplaceable. My anxiety is that with college bookstores now moving entirely to the paperless format, it changes how people interact with texts.
If the result is not a renaissance and a resurgence of reading, but less reading, that will be dreadful because the experience of thinking your way into other people's minds that sustained reading offers is is so crucial to human empathy a broadening of your own sensibilities of what's possible, what's in the full range of being human, and then what's best.
What are the best models for what has been thought and felt and how people have acted? Otherwise, we fall prey to manipulators and the ability of artificial intelligence to give us versions of realities that never existed and never will and the like.
Well, audiobooks are definitely not to be scorned because, as people have pointed out, the original traditions of literature were oral, right? So that's actually the 1.0 version, right? And combining these things is probably the key. I think one of the things I find so wonderful about
The best lectures that I've heard is it's a chance to hear someone thinking out loud, not laying down the law, but taking you through a series of logical moves, imaginative leaps, alternative suggestions, and that's much more than data transfer.
So we talked indeed about a lot of latent, really damaging and negative energies that are part of human nature, but I find hope in another aspect of human nature, and that is the sheer variety of human reactions to situations.
The very fact that history is full of so many stories of amazing endurance, amazing resilience, the will to build up even after the horrors have passed, this to me is an inexhaustible source of optimism. And, you know, there are some people who condemn cultural appropriation and say that borrowing from one culture to another is to be condemned.
The problem is a synonym for cultural appropriation is world history. Trade, transfer of ideas, influences, valuing that which is unlike your own culture is also a form of appropriation, quite literally. And so that multitude of human reactions and the fact that our experience is so unlimited, as history testifies, gives me great hope for the future.
That's right, unceasingly.
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