LETTERS; GREAT BOOKS BETTER THAN WEB PAGES

To the editor:

It cannot be worse. Yes, it can. It is worse if we learn nothing from all of this. Rather, we are driven to unfold our road maps again and check where we are going. I think of two topics, among others, which many have voluntarily abandoned for areas which they believed more exciting and relevant, life interests which might have saved us.

Last week I put a 24-exposure roll of film in my trusty camera and walked about the heart of our city taking shots of redbud and white cherry trees and purple and white creeping phlox. Some asked me, "What use do you plan to make of these? How much did the film cost?"

The result is a warming illustration of the beauty around us, which Keats says is its own excuse for being. This week I would include dogwood. And English poet regrets that "50 springs are little room" to look at blossoming trees, yet it was that very week when our cherries were blooming that the boys in Colorado shot themselves and their friends. Ironic too that they lived in one of the scenic spots of the world where people from around the globe come to admire, while the boys retreated to the basement to study flickering images on a Web page. What might have happened had they followed the poet's choice?

The great books of the ages give us better advice than Web pages. The Bible has murder stories too. Cain kills Abel. Did the others say, "I didn't think this would happen in our town"? The fact that it is included illustrates what we have been capable of from the beginning. But the preacher in Ecclesiastes exhorts us to wear white clothes, not black, to anoint our heads with oil and to live happily with our wives.

Again and again in a course I taught in which we listened to Beethoven's symphonies and studied the art of Van Gogh, who also killed himself after he went mad, my students would say, "I had no idea there was such beauty in the world." But it has long been there, waiting for us. Daily papers once carried a new poem in each issue in space now given to murder stories. Since Freud and before, we are supersaturated with "counseling," yet things get worse. As I walked to Hardee's this morning, I thought, "I find more happiness in the pink dogwood at the corner of Pacific and Bellevue than in a big screen filled with Oprah's unctuous counselors." Present teachers tell me, "Students are different now than when you taught," but I do not believe that. To agree would require me to take recreant positions I am unwilling to take. Courage. We are not yet in the millennium.

PETER HILTY

Cape Girardeau