One Poem, One man; the Task Before Us

OPERA, AND POETRY. What do they have in common? they have both been consigned to the scrapheap, as the two dying art forms of the twenty first century. And yet, somehow, in a world of reality TV and sound byte sensationalism, they yet survive, if only by fingernails at cliff's edge.

But remember the radio! Doomed to extinction by the invention of television, said the doom sayers. And remember the book on paper! Condemned to the dumpster,with the proliferation of computer reading, many argued, And that still may happen; books are just too darned expensive, there are just too darned many of them being written, and a library can only build so many annexes. Meanwhile, computers keep getting cheaper...and cheaper..and easier to use, and more portable. A formidable combination of attributes against which books made from trees must contend.

So surely somebody somewhere will always want to hear the perfect voices demanded of and supplied by opera. And surely the beautifully intense use of words inherent in good poetry will always draw an audience of some sort, assuming there will be people willing to read anything. The average american, is has been calculated, reads one book per lifetime beyond high school, and illiteracy stalks the world like some philistinic spectre...

If only everyone could but pick a favorite book, a favorite poem, a favorite libretto, a favorite opera, and cling to it like a smudge on a table of contents. Have you ever read just one poem that moved you so that you wanted to read it again and again, to the point of rote memorization? If you have not, you could, you know. for everyone, there is a poem, a perfect poem, begging to be read, again, and again.  One man, one poem.

Consider the great novel "Fahrenheit 451, by ray bradbury. In a world where books are altogether banned, a secret society springs into being, in which every member is assigned the task of commiting to perfect memory one, just one book, to be chosen, if memory serves, by the memorizer.the function of  the fire department in this nightmarish future society is not to extinguish unwanted fires, but rather, to seek out and burn books.

Let ushope that our real world never comes to something that appalling. But it almost has before, and  could again. Our task is to see to it that it never does.