Couldn't resist the pun, but I'm referring to the poet and critic T.S. Eliot and not the "Untouchable" G-man. If you like, there's a very nice essay about him by Joseph Epstein over at Commentary.
Anyway, reading it reminded me of an experience related to me by old friend from when he was a graduate student at Princeton. If I remember correctly (it's been at least twenty years now), he was at party attended by both fellow graduate students and their professors. At one point in conversation one of the professors made a remark in which he used the line, "April is the cruellest month." Puzzled, my friend asked him what he meant by that, to which the prof huffed and patronizingly explained that it was from Eliot's The Waste Land , "arguably the most important poem of the Twentieth Century." To which my friend, no dummy, just as quickly responded, "Then why haven't I read it?"
My friend was not asserting with that question his intellectual superiority, as in, "If I haven't read it, it couldn't be that important." Rather, if indeed The Waste Land was that important, with his question he was indicting that professor and the entire enterprise of higher education in America that he represented, for, in the name of avoiding anything so, God forbid!, undemocratic as standards, failing to teach it to him long before he ever arrived at such an elite institution for graduate studies.
Sadly, it's only gotten worse since then.
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