The canon and quotations, Part 2

Another way to look at it: One of the standard books is called Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and I don’t think you can ignore the word “familiar.”

It might be a regional usage, but if you are familiar with something, you know it intimately. Intimacy can happen in an instant — a chance meeting, a magical moment. But familiarity is a kind of intimacy that lasts. It lasts so long that one’s understanding of the intimacy changes.

I think we people of the polis spend our lives arguing about what’s remarkable, what’s good and what’s better. Asking human beings to stop developing canons of literature is like asking bees to stop building hives.