A long time ago, in a freshman English class, my professor realized that no one in the class understood the significance of the phrase “ecce homo.” He was taken aback for a moment, and then said: “Oh well. The culture is dead.”
I was shaken by that at the time, but if classical cultural was dead decades ago, modern culture, such as it was, is following rapidly in its wake. A case in point is today’s correction in the New York Times:
An article on Saturday about Thomas Mayo, a champion of the effort in Australia to give Indigenous people a voice in Parliament, misidentified the author of the book “Catch-22.” Joseph Heller wrote the book, not Nathan Heller.
How soon they forget! Catch-22 was a classic of the 1960s. Do people still read it today? I don’t know. The phrase “catch-22” persists in the language, I believe, but probably most people have no idea what it refers to.
Naturally, I was curious as to whether there is such a person as Nathan Heller. It turns out that Nathan Heller is the fictional hero of a popular series of detective books by Max Collins. More likely, the benighted Times writer (and his alleged editor) were thinking of this Nathan Heller, a staff writer for The New Yorker. Well, at least he is a writer of sorts. And who can be expected to remember something that happened in the dim past of 1961?
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