If a lost folio of some forgotten contemporary of Shakespeare were discovered, a collection of plays which were more entertaining, moving, and inspiring than the works of Shakespeare, plays which more convincingly depicted the range and depth of the human experience, which were more surprising and delightful and sobering, which were by some objective measure "better" plays than Shakespeare's, then I still think that Shakespeare's plays would probably be "greater" and more worthy of study and consumption
A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country, they've shaped and influenced our language, culture, and every work of literature which followed.
Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day. And the "value" which a reader or watcher can extract from the works of Shakespeare can be enhanced by the hundreds of years of critics and audience who have already written about and engaged with his works.
This reminds me of the theory that the King James is the best English translation of The Bible because it has heavily influenced the English language. So we intuitively understand the true meaning of KJV phrases better than we do those in a more literally faithful translation.
Just passing along a fun idea and not looking for a debate.
While I realize that you're overstating both cases for rhetorical purposes, (that these undiscovered works are "better", and that Shakespeare is still "greater") I think that you're short-changing "discovery". We might find that Shakespeare's works were, not just influenced by these unknown works, but outright homages, or that these undiscovered works somehow offer greater context and insight into some previously known author's works. In a similar vein, the linked article spends to much time fearing what's lost and not enough thinking about what we may yet find.
This take seems a bit pessimistic about the longevity of society to me. If we still have tens or hundreds of thousands of years to go, just going with whatever was best by 2020 seems a bit ad hoc. Not that I know the future.
The issue is that, while writing skill is rare and somewhat objective, writing performance is intensely subjective. The experiment's been done where people take award-winning novels and throw them at the submission process... and don't even get past the query stage, 9 times out of 10. This is exacerbated by a climate wherein the "book buzz" that drives quick sales is generated by people who, while narrowly specialized in their professions and therefore deservingly relevant on specific topics, haven't read for pleasure since they were in high school.
Relevance can be measured. On the other hand, aesthetic quality is not only subjective, but highly relevant writing (such as Shakespeare's) changes the aesthetics on which it, as well as everything else, is judged.
Of course, most writers secretly long to still be read 100 years after they die, but not only will they never know this (except perhaps in an afterlife) for sure, but it's highly uncorrelated to performance while alive. If you had asked people in the 1920s which books of the time would be remembered in 2022, you'd be read a litany of works almost none of us have heard of... while Great Gatsby, which probably objectively is the great (as in, most relevant) American novel, would not have made the top 20.
> A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country
This is far from true, except in the sense that such people know the name "Shakespeare". The percentage of people having ever attended school in an English speaking country who can recite one sonnet by Shakespeare is going to be... low.
> they've shaped and influenced our language [and] culture
Sure, that's true.
> Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day.
But that isn't. Most Anglophones, as noted above, already aren't familiar with the works of Shakespeare. But they don't have problems understanding phrases and references that may ultimately trace back to him. You can learn words without learning how the words came to be, and in fact that's the only way you can learn words.
(On a side note, this is exactly the problem with the "classic" TNG episode Darmok. The universal translator can translate any language without any prior knowledge being necessary. So it can understand that the sounds the aliens are making mean "Shaka, when the walls fell". It just doesn't know what "Shaka, when the walls fell" means.
But that's not how language works. The episode itself makes it very explicit that the aliens speak a language in which Shakawhenthewallsfell is a single word meaning "doom, defeat, and despair". You don't need to know the story of Shaka to know the meaning of the word.)
Like old laws that have been interpreted by the courts in many unantipicated situations - presented as obvious generalization; arguably, judicial legislation.
\taunt Arguably, the most influential work of English literature is the King James Version of the Bible.
> There’s yet another problem: the sheer volume of texts. When it comes to Indian and Buddhist traditions, for example, the number of ancient manuscripts that have survived but are yet to be studied has been estimated at around 10m, though Friedrich says he has seen estimates as high as 30m. There simply aren’t enough scholars with the right expertise, including the necessary language skills, to do the work.
I was worried a lot about this during my PhD. Well-cited papers were just the "tip of the iceberg". I did some fairly thorough searches and came across quite a few papers in my field that were important in my view and unfortunately overlooked.
The problem doesn't seem intractable to me. More researchers should spend some time searching the literature where they think no one else did. If a certain percentage of people did this, then I think it would benefit everyone including those who don't do particularly deep searches.
First off i don't understand how this 10-30k number is physically or culturally possible. ( i admit my tired brain thought million first - confusing british/roman systems! )
Also having read sporadically through various dzogchen texts on "dream yoga" which is an older mapping and superset of what we today call lucid dreaming i'm positive that there could be an incredible amount of "useful knowledge" of various "weirder" aspects and concepts of consciousness and dreams waiting for us in some of those texts.
There's a lot that I would say is troubling about this number.
Psychotherapists have been prescribing mindfulness-based interventions at increasing rates in the past few decades. You can't escape mindfulness, you'll hear about it everywhere you go. Yet, most of the literature about mindfulness or meditation and its impact on health is written in Sanskrit. Some of it is translated, and some of the translations make their way into English-language papers in psychotherapy or psychology journals, but it's such a small amount.
Rather that dig through Buddhist texts, we have created our own, new set of practices called "mindfulness meditation", prescribing it left and right, going on vipassana retreats, reading books on transcendental meditation, etc.
Mindfulness meditation is a western invention assembled out of pieces, taken out of context, of Buddhist and other traditions. Transcendental meditation was invented by a yogi in the 1950s. To be clear, I'm not talking about how recent these are in order to imply that older traditions are better--but older practices are better studied and we don't read about the older practices.
You can find a ton of studies in western medical journals about the benefits of various MBIs, but these studies, taken as a whole, are somewhat troubling. One troubling aspect is that many of the benefits are based on data which is self-reported, and the nature of questions in a self-reported study is limited. This is normal and expected in these kinds of studies, but it gives us a very narrow selection of observations about the effects of MBIs, and these questions / observations are often selected in order to prove positive effects--researchers, of course, want to prove positive effects of MBIs.
Meanwhile, there's two millenia of scholarly work, including descriptions of negative outcomes from meditation--what those negative outcomes were and how to structure the practice of meditation to prevent those negative outcomes--but these scholarly works are, again, not written in English and you hardly ever see literature reviews of these works in western medical journals.
Anyway. As a metaphor, it seems like we're exploring a continent, and there are people already living here, but we're ignoring them because they speak Sanskrit, and some of us are getting hurt. It's not even really the ancient texts, but modern texts, even modern texts with English translations.
"... But the entirety of extant literature in Greek and Latin through to, say, the Late Empire is probably enough to fill a single small bookstore. It's a lot, sure. But a single person could probably read all of it. Even if you added to that all the personal correspondences unearthed in papyri and on wax tablets, and all the inscriptional material I doubt that it is impossible for a human to read all of it. I certainly wouldn't want to. I can't think of anyone who would want to, really. How many grave inscriptions would they have to read? How many tabulae in which a soldier in Britain sends for underwear or something? Still, it would be doable. Once you push the threshold of "ancient Romans" through into the very ass-end of Late Antiquity, though, it is quite plainly impossible for a single human to read it all.
In fact, "Ancient Latin" represents less than one percent of all that has been written in the language. We pigeonhole this language as "ancient" because 19th century ideas about what "real" Latin is have — in a highly warped form — delimited the general sense of what Latin is, and can be, how it can be learned, and how it can be read."
This is an idea that fascinates me and it goes beyond literature. it certainly includes history.
One of my favorite examples is cuneiform tablets. Less than 10% of the 500k to 1m tablets recovered have ever been translated. These are particularly interesting because they're some of the earliest examples of surviving written records we have.
The Hittite capital Hattusa (IIRC) was lost for millenia. When it was found it was a veritable treasure trove including personal correspondence between the Hittie king and the Egyptian pharoah Ramses II.
Nineveh was sacked at one point. A massive fire destroyed the library but baked the clay tablets preserving them.
In the early days of Rome, Rome (the city) was sacked by Gauls. This destroyed a lot of the early works of Rome. This affected Rome's expansion (eg Caesar's conquest of Gaul has been argued to be affected by the cultural significance of this sacking). I's one reason why the origins of Rome are somewhat steeped in myth and legend rather than fact such as the apocryphal tale of Romulus and Reemus.
Another example are the histories of Alexander the Great. Alexander died under mysterious circumstances at the height of his power (in his early 30s). Several primary sources were written by his inner circle. None have survived. We know this because a Roman named Arrion some 2 centuries later wrote about the campaigns of Alexander citing 3 such sources (all lost) comparing what they agreed on and what they didn't.
A lot was lost in the Arab sacking of the Libary of Alexandria.
I somewhat agree with some other commenters in that literary significance is more... relative. Put another way: part of their cultural significance comes from them being known, studied, performed and repaeted over centuries.
I'm convinced there are some savant-level writers out there who have written the worlds greatest novels, and we will never get to read them. I'm thinking of the person who is so enlightened that they feel no need to share it (for monetary or social gain). Or the person who has such imposter syndrome that they never bothered to share. Or the person who finished the novel and burnt it down.
I bet there are also bodies of work by posters on internet forums, social media etc. that would constitute great works if properly compiled, edited, and promoted.
Sometimes these posters are locally famous in their online communities, but in other cases they are overlooked even on their home turf. Perhaps in hundreds of years some of this stuff will be dug up and celebrated, either by humans or AI.
The same thing definitely happens with software too. There are some masterpieces of engineering out there with 15 stars on Github.
I suspect there are many more who never had the opportunity: As a start, I guess that most humans in history have been illiterate. More did not have access to publishers. First, before the printing press (~1475 in England), publishing more than your personal hand-written volume was very expensive - each copy hand-written. Also in most of the world, usually only those who were considered male, of a certain socio-economic class, and whose writing fit norms (not controversial in content, style, etc.), had access to publishing.
IME great literature has to connect at an emotional level. Dostoevsky is a great writer because he understands what it is to be human at a level that no one else can match. I wonder if a savant-level writer could write in a way that resonates in the way other great literature does.
> the person who is so enlightened that they feel no need to share it (for monetary or social gain).
Isn't part of enlightenment a sense of the imperative to share? How can you be enlightened without compassion, and thus the motivation to enlighten others?
To the latter, famously, the works we most remember Kafka by are works he entrusted to Max Brod for Brod to burn after his death, but which Brod instead edited and published.
Emily Dickinson was almost one of those people, until her sister discovered her cache of poems (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Dickinson). Maybe not a good example of lost works, but a good example of how easily it could happen.
A somewhat-recent example of a great novel that was recently discovered was "Stoner" by John Williams, which is about an English professor named William Stoner who stoically lived a seemingly unremarkable life that still evokes sympathy and empathy.
The book was first published in 1965, but failed to gain popularity. It took until 2013 to gain wide popularity, and is a contender as one of the greatest American novels.
> The numbers they published in Science magazine earlier this year don’t make for happy reading, but they corroborate figures arrived at by other methods. The researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains.
It's impossible to say whether the greatest works of literature are undiscovered, or even lost. That's the tragedy of it, that we'll never know. We do know that we've lost a lot, not only from the medieval era, but even in our own lifetimes. Despite digitization and home recording, a ton of media (not just literature) was has been lost in warehouse fires, or even by having the only copies taped over. Or, never even committed to physical media at all. Even today, when we secretly believe everything we do is tracked by somebody, a bad backup system or a decision to cut costs on storage can wipe out years of data. The work of archivists is to save what they can, not to save everything. It's a losing battle.
I used to hang out with musicians and play music with them and jam into the late hours of the early morning. Sometimes we would record our jams, but most of the time we would not.
Listening to these old recordings, you would occasionally find magic and "endless wonder" (see Warehouse 13 episode "Resonance"), and that got me thinking: how much incredible music has been lost to time, music that wasn’t written down and composed and was never recorded?
Rick Beato claims that there are thousands of unreleased albums where the artist couldn't afford distribution. Or, the artist couldn't afford to pay the engineer or producer and the master is held hostage, waiting for a payment that will never happen. (The engineer/producer doesn't own the copyright so they can't release it on their own.)
Maybe not the same but in the modern era, with film, maybe: acting. In my region live theater is pretty well-developed, and there are amazing actors and actresses who never achieve the fame of film actors and actresses largely because their work isn't in a recorded medium.
We almost didn’t have Confederacy of Dunces. The fact that it was published is a miracle. Toole’s mom was persistent enough and managed to get the manuscript in front of someone with just enough patience to give it a look.
Such a good book. One of I think 3 books I’ve read cover to cover in a day. Which, sure, also says something about the particular days I decided to read those books, but still–it’s fantastic.
I haven’t had one of those kinds of days in so long. I miss the freedom and relaxation!
Tomas Moore's account of the events covered in The Vertical Plane have never been found (1 copy, handwritten in latin, hidden for safekeeping).
Where is Tomas’s own account, his book that was finished
at Oxford and left somewhere in manuscript? We never
forget that ‘2109’ said it would be found, and we can only
hope that this will happen in our lifetime.
It’s pretty much guaranteed that in most of areas of life there are/were some undiscovered geniuses. If you grew up in Germany during my youth there would have been a good chance you wouldn’t have been discovered if you were the best basketball player of all time. Or it’s very possible that some band write the perfect rock song but never published it. Or that somebody wrote a great book but didn’t bother to get it published.
Years ago in high school I observed that there appeared to be no great works of literature that were not in the public domain - because the school book publishers don’t want to pay royalties to anyone, and to a lesser degree nobody wants to do literary analysis of a living author who can dispute their interpretation! Admittedly a little cynical but I think there is a lot of truth to both.
I was also annoyed at all the “yoda speak” translations of ancient literature we had to read whereas any student would be graded down for not putting their parts of speech in the English order.
Then you have things like Candide that would be considered super offensive in the US - where a friend of mine once had a summer job airbrushing away cow udders from a school textbook because the state of Texas (which buys the most text books) felt they were too suggestive. (A few decades ago but Texas still decides what goes in most school text books by virtue of being the largest consumer)
I don't think there's that much truth to your observation.
"The Great Gatsby" only entered the public domain last year, while its Wikipedia entry says it "was part of the assigned curricula in the near majority of U.S. high schools".
"'The Grapes of Wrath' is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy" says its Wikipedia page, and it's still in copyright.
In 1981, "Catcher in the Rye", according to its Wikipedia entry "was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States." Salinger didn't die until 2010.
I think it's important to note that that contemporary language death at the hands of the major lingua francas (you know who you are) is wiping out great and possibly very old works of oral 'literature'. Quite a few of our surviving great epics, sagas, and lyric(s) originated as oral works. With the death of collapse of these languages, from the Amazon to Siberia to Africa to Europe, these works (not to mention the loads of historical and cultural revealed in them) have or will shortly go entirely extinct.
I mean, go and look who were the most famous authors 200 years ago and you will not recognize one name. The amount of legendary writers we have lost to time and moldy paper is huge
In 1822, Byron, Coleridge, and Wordsworth were alive and writing. In Germany, Goethe was alive and still writing. In France, Chateaubriand was publishing.
Off topic, but phrases like "it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true." bother me. Of course we can know if that is true. This is like saying "it is said the books, upon burning, all turned into unicorns, sang silly songs, and flew to the moon. We can't know if this is true."
The physics of combustion hasn't changed in the last 2000 years.
Nah? The really greatest works were copied many times and committed to memory to be preserved even during multi-generation subjugation. At least greatest in meeting practical, emotional and spiritual needs of contemporaries, our historical interest today is not the most important thing in the world.
This is extremely similar to the field of music for me.
As a vinyl DJ, hip hop producer, and turntablist, one of the greatest joys is finding one of those rare LPs that just never was heard, and - even better - that juicy sample in it.
Obviously there’s gotta be unknown literature out there that’s brilliant. :)
This sounds like a problem for AI to solve. The AI can be trained with literature labeled at different level of greatest and then build a model to scan all the literature. Then one day the AI will come out of the cave: I just read a million books, so you don't have to!
[+] [-] sharkjacobs|3 years ago|reply
A big, big part of what makes Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "great" is that they've been the foremost works of English literature for hundreds of years. They're known to everyone who attended school in an English speaking country, they've shaped and influenced our language, culture, and every work of literature which followed.
Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day. And the "value" which a reader or watcher can extract from the works of Shakespeare can be enhanced by the hundreds of years of critics and audience who have already written about and engaged with his works.
[+] [-] 1123581321|3 years ago|reply
Just passing along a fun idea and not looking for a debate.
[+] [-] mftb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wallscratch|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 21723|3 years ago|reply
Relevance can be measured. On the other hand, aesthetic quality is not only subjective, but highly relevant writing (such as Shakespeare's) changes the aesthetics on which it, as well as everything else, is judged.
Of course, most writers secretly long to still be read 100 years after they die, but not only will they never know this (except perhaps in an afterlife) for sure, but it's highly uncorrelated to performance while alive. If you had asked people in the 1920s which books of the time would be remembered in 2022, you'd be read a litany of works almost none of us have heard of... while Great Gatsby, which probably objectively is the great (as in, most relevant) American novel, would not have made the top 20.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|3 years ago|reply
This is far from true, except in the sense that such people know the name "Shakespeare". The percentage of people having ever attended school in an English speaking country who can recite one sonnet by Shakespeare is going to be... low.
> they've shaped and influenced our language [and] culture
Sure, that's true.
> Being familiar with the works of Shakespeare is necessary context for a thousand phrases and references that you'll encounter every day.
But that isn't. Most Anglophones, as noted above, already aren't familiar with the works of Shakespeare. But they don't have problems understanding phrases and references that may ultimately trace back to him. You can learn words without learning how the words came to be, and in fact that's the only way you can learn words.
(On a side note, this is exactly the problem with the "classic" TNG episode Darmok. The universal translator can translate any language without any prior knowledge being necessary. So it can understand that the sounds the aliens are making mean "Shaka, when the walls fell". It just doesn't know what "Shaka, when the walls fell" means.
But that's not how language works. The episode itself makes it very explicit that the aliens speak a language in which Shakawhenthewallsfell is a single word meaning "doom, defeat, and despair". You don't need to know the story of Shaka to know the meaning of the word.)
[+] [-] scotty79|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|3 years ago|reply
Like old laws that have been interpreted by the courts in many unantipicated situations - presented as obvious generalization; arguably, judicial legislation.
\taunt Arguably, the most influential work of English literature is the King James Version of the Bible.
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] btrettel|3 years ago|reply
I was worried a lot about this during my PhD. Well-cited papers were just the "tip of the iceberg". I did some fairly thorough searches and came across quite a few papers in my field that were important in my view and unfortunately overlooked.
The problem doesn't seem intractable to me. More researchers should spend some time searching the literature where they think no one else did. If a certain percentage of people did this, then I think it would benefit everyone including those who don't do particularly deep searches.
[+] [-] kossTKR|3 years ago|reply
Also having read sporadically through various dzogchen texts on "dream yoga" which is an older mapping and superset of what we today call lucid dreaming i'm positive that there could be an incredible amount of "useful knowledge" of various "weirder" aspects and concepts of consciousness and dreams waiting for us in some of those texts.
Exciting!
[+] [-] klodolph|3 years ago|reply
Psychotherapists have been prescribing mindfulness-based interventions at increasing rates in the past few decades. You can't escape mindfulness, you'll hear about it everywhere you go. Yet, most of the literature about mindfulness or meditation and its impact on health is written in Sanskrit. Some of it is translated, and some of the translations make their way into English-language papers in psychotherapy or psychology journals, but it's such a small amount.
Rather that dig through Buddhist texts, we have created our own, new set of practices called "mindfulness meditation", prescribing it left and right, going on vipassana retreats, reading books on transcendental meditation, etc.
Mindfulness meditation is a western invention assembled out of pieces, taken out of context, of Buddhist and other traditions. Transcendental meditation was invented by a yogi in the 1950s. To be clear, I'm not talking about how recent these are in order to imply that older traditions are better--but older practices are better studied and we don't read about the older practices.
You can find a ton of studies in western medical journals about the benefits of various MBIs, but these studies, taken as a whole, are somewhat troubling. One troubling aspect is that many of the benefits are based on data which is self-reported, and the nature of questions in a self-reported study is limited. This is normal and expected in these kinds of studies, but it gives us a very narrow selection of observations about the effects of MBIs, and these questions / observations are often selected in order to prove positive effects--researchers, of course, want to prove positive effects of MBIs.
Meanwhile, there's two millenia of scholarly work, including descriptions of negative outcomes from meditation--what those negative outcomes were and how to structure the practice of meditation to prevent those negative outcomes--but these scholarly works are, again, not written in English and you hardly ever see literature reviews of these works in western medical journals.
Anyway. As a metaphor, it seems like we're exploring a continent, and there are people already living here, but we're ignoring them because they speak Sanskrit, and some of us are getting hurt. It's not even really the ancient texts, but modern texts, even modern texts with English translations.
[+] [-] Jun8|3 years ago|reply
On a tangential note: Corpus of Classical Texts that we have is really small, e.g. (http://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2019/03/argumentum-ad-ignora...):
"... But the entirety of extant literature in Greek and Latin through to, say, the Late Empire is probably enough to fill a single small bookstore. It's a lot, sure. But a single person could probably read all of it. Even if you added to that all the personal correspondences unearthed in papyri and on wax tablets, and all the inscriptional material I doubt that it is impossible for a human to read all of it. I certainly wouldn't want to. I can't think of anyone who would want to, really. How many grave inscriptions would they have to read? How many tabulae in which a soldier in Britain sends for underwear or something? Still, it would be doable. Once you push the threshold of "ancient Romans" through into the very ass-end of Late Antiquity, though, it is quite plainly impossible for a single human to read it all.
In fact, "Ancient Latin" represents less than one percent of all that has been written in the language. We pigeonhole this language as "ancient" because 19th century ideas about what "real" Latin is have — in a highly warped form — delimited the general sense of what Latin is, and can be, how it can be learned, and how it can be read."
See also this answer in Latin SE: https://latin.stackexchange.com/questions/16669/is-this-the-....
[+] [-] jcranmer|3 years ago|reply
This is the entirety of extant Greek/Latin literature, with a full English translation: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f4/1f/1e/f41f1eeffc2127a467df... (citing https://acoup.blog/2021/03/26/fireside-friday-march-26-2021-...). It's not so much a "single small bookstore" as it is "a large bookshelf".
[+] [-] cletus|3 years ago|reply
One of my favorite examples is cuneiform tablets. Less than 10% of the 500k to 1m tablets recovered have ever been translated. These are particularly interesting because they're some of the earliest examples of surviving written records we have.
The Hittite capital Hattusa (IIRC) was lost for millenia. When it was found it was a veritable treasure trove including personal correspondence between the Hittie king and the Egyptian pharoah Ramses II.
Nineveh was sacked at one point. A massive fire destroyed the library but baked the clay tablets preserving them.
In the early days of Rome, Rome (the city) was sacked by Gauls. This destroyed a lot of the early works of Rome. This affected Rome's expansion (eg Caesar's conquest of Gaul has been argued to be affected by the cultural significance of this sacking). I's one reason why the origins of Rome are somewhat steeped in myth and legend rather than fact such as the apocryphal tale of Romulus and Reemus.
Another example are the histories of Alexander the Great. Alexander died under mysterious circumstances at the height of his power (in his early 30s). Several primary sources were written by his inner circle. None have survived. We know this because a Roman named Arrion some 2 centuries later wrote about the campaigns of Alexander citing 3 such sources (all lost) comparing what they agreed on and what they didn't.
A lot was lost in the Arab sacking of the Libary of Alexandria.
I somewhat agree with some other commenters in that literary significance is more... relative. Put another way: part of their cultural significance comes from them being known, studied, performed and repaeted over centuries.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|3 years ago|reply
It'd be a bit like stumbling across someone's tax records receipts box in another 8,000 years or so. Presuming thermal paper survives the interval.
(Morgan Freeman voice: It won't.)
[+] [-] syndacks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danenania|3 years ago|reply
Sometimes these posters are locally famous in their online communities, but in other cases they are overlooked even on their home turf. Perhaps in hundreds of years some of this stuff will be dug up and celebrated, either by humans or AI.
The same thing definitely happens with software too. There are some masterpieces of engineering out there with 15 stars on Github.
[+] [-] wolverine876|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nineplay|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellavora|3 years ago|reply
Isn't part of enlightenment a sense of the imperative to share? How can you be enlightened without compassion, and thus the motivation to enlighten others?
[+] [-] vidarh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derbOac|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] honkler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] insightcheck|3 years ago|reply
The book was first published in 1965, but failed to gain popularity. It took until 2013 to gain wide popularity, and is a contender as one of the greatest American novels.
Coverage about the book's resurgence was published in The New Yorker (paywalled at https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-greatest-ame...) and The Guardian (no paywall, via https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/13/stoner-john-wi...).
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
It's impossible to say whether the greatest works of literature are undiscovered, or even lost. That's the tragedy of it, that we'll never know. We do know that we've lost a lot, not only from the medieval era, but even in our own lifetimes. Despite digitization and home recording, a ton of media (not just literature) was has been lost in warehouse fires, or even by having the only copies taped over. Or, never even committed to physical media at all. Even today, when we secretly believe everything we do is tracked by somebody, a bad backup system or a decision to cut costs on storage can wipe out years of data. The work of archivists is to save what they can, not to save everything. It's a losing battle.
[+] [-] sammalloy|3 years ago|reply
Listening to these old recordings, you would occasionally find magic and "endless wonder" (see Warehouse 13 episode "Resonance"), and that got me thinking: how much incredible music has been lost to time, music that wasn’t written down and composed and was never recorded?
[+] [-] anamax|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derbOac|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] damontal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sixstringtheory|3 years ago|reply
I haven’t had one of those kinds of days in so long. I miss the freedom and relaxation!
[+] [-] BMc2020|3 years ago|reply
Where is Tomas’s own account, his book that was finished at Oxford and left somewhere in manuscript? We never forget that ‘2109’ said it would be found, and we can only hope that this will happen in our lifetime.
[+] [-] delaaxe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metadaemon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spaetzleesser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|3 years ago|reply
I was also annoyed at all the “yoda speak” translations of ancient literature we had to read whereas any student would be graded down for not putting their parts of speech in the English order.
Then you have things like Candide that would be considered super offensive in the US - where a friend of mine once had a summer job airbrushing away cow udders from a school textbook because the state of Texas (which buys the most text books) felt they were too suggestive. (A few decades ago but Texas still decides what goes in most school text books by virtue of being the largest consumer)
[+] [-] eesmith|3 years ago|reply
"The Great Gatsby" only entered the public domain last year, while its Wikipedia entry says it "was part of the assigned curricula in the near majority of U.S. high schools".
"'The Grapes of Wrath' is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes due to its historical context and enduring legacy" says its Wikipedia page, and it's still in copyright.
In 1981, "Catcher in the Rye", according to its Wikipedia entry "was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States." Salinger didn't die until 2010.
[+] [-] hyperpallium2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lr4444lr|3 years ago|reply
It's always very exciting when we find some accidentally well preserved archeological site for the chance that we might come across new scrolls.
[+] [-] fourtrees|3 years ago|reply
Not too much we can do about it though.
[+] [-] HidyBush|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cafard|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolverine876|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmd|3 years ago|reply
The physics of combustion hasn't changed in the last 2000 years.
[+] [-] cat_plus_plus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostgame|3 years ago|reply
As a vinyl DJ, hip hop producer, and turntablist, one of the greatest joys is finding one of those rare LPs that just never was heard, and - even better - that juicy sample in it.
Obviously there’s gotta be unknown literature out there that’s brilliant. :)
[+] [-] temp8964|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ethanwillis|3 years ago|reply