Day 102

It isn't difficult to read into classic literature and find political messages. The tricky part is separating the intended political messages from the unintended ones; those which are genuinely just inadvertent signs of the time. I just finished Robinson Crusoe, the old Defoe novel about a shipwrecked man who builds a life for himself on a deserted island. Fro a historical perspective it is very much a capitalist manifesto, and as much as Defoe did intend to some extent to purport his ideology, I imagine much of it was accidental, or in some sense assumed.

Such is the trick of old fiction: (a common theme in my writing) we are often not so much reading the material as we are reading into the material; combining the words with out own thoughts to create a hybrid work. We cannot help it.

I sometimes wonder what today's literature will be read as in the distant future, perhaps several centuries from now.

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