Lindsay Johns has a little piece worth reading on the literary canon, arguing for its universal validity. The most striking passage:
The dead white men never had to face the evils of slavery or the physical and emotional oppression of racism. Thus their minds were freer to range over the great philosophical questions, metaphysical quandaries and cosmological dilemmas. In short, they have been allowed to address man in relation to the macrocosm, as opposed to just the microcosm.
The last sentence formulates almost precisely what I look for in literature.
I have long thought that this is the single greatest thing about being white and male: on so many days, when the world seems overwhelmingly horrible, disgusting in itself as well as utterly repugnant to me and hostile to all my desires, when the basic conditions of existence seem evil in themselves and the end results not worth the effort, when I see all the good I had hoped for not only in my own life but in others’ blighted by malice or folly, when my thoughts swallow all my actions and poison my whole day, when my memory is filled to the brim with evil and I see nothing better in the future, this at least I know: no one imposed this on me but God, or the Universe, or Existence, or whatever you want to call it, and I do not dream that I might have escaped it somehow by an alteration of my race, or my gender, or anything else, but know that there is no alternative but to face it.
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