Sculpture by Brian Keith, Danville, CA
When I was still a young high school teacher in the late 1970s, any references to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy were met with befuddled stares. I might as well have been alluding to the death of Abraham Lincoln nearly a hundred years earlier. A decade later, following the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986, my allusion to the mythical Icarus flying too close to the sun drew similarly puzzling looks from my seniors. So did most references to the opening of a Pandora's Box or to Sisyphus rolling a rock uphill. My students had a better chance of understanding allusions to Prometheus offering the gift of fire to man or to Atlas supporting the world on his shoulders, given the prominent statues of those mythological figures at Rockefeller Center in midtown Manhattan, just over thirty miles from our school. But even that was far from guaranteed.
To provide a foundation for the rich array of classical and biblical allusions that our students would encounter in their reading, my suburban public school's English department taught Greek and Roman mythology, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, and excerpts from The Bible for Students of Literature and Art. Sometimes it helped, sometimes it didn't. In the 2010s, near the close of my career, a few of my AP Lit seniors would identify some of Shakespeare's allusions to mythology or Toni Morrison's biblical references in her title Song of Solomon, but her ironic allusion to Pontius Pilate in the novel elicited bovine stares from many in the class. As church attendance continued its decline in that first decade of the new century, fewer and fewer of my AP seniors recognized T.S. Eliot's allusion to John the Baptist in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. But occasionally, they delighted themselves (and me) by recognizing mythological and biblical allusions in Hardy's novels The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Among my fondest memories of teaching is my rare quintuple impression, an allusion to Dead Poet's Society as we viewed the film in class. It's a multilayered imitation of Mr. Kersting doing Robin Williams doing Mr. Keating doing John Wayne doing Macbeth: "Is that a dagger I see before me?" voiced in John Wayne's clipped cadences and enacted with his lumbering swagger. "Who's John Wayne?" someone asked. Alas.
Ours is not the first generation to bemoan the deficiencies of its youth. As far back as classical times philosophers complained about the ignorance of the young. Closer to home, Mark Twain once said, "When I was seventeen I was convinced my father was a damn fool. When I was twenty-one I was astounded by how much the old man had learned in four years." In 2017, the writer John McPhee quoted columnist Frank Bruni on a class Bruni was teaching at Princeton a few years earlier: "[H]ardly a class goes by when I don't make an allusion that prompts my students to stare at me as if I had just dropped in from the Paleozoic era. . . . [In] a discussion of an essay that repeatedly invoked Proust's madeleine . . . I realized that almost none of the students understood what the madeleine signified, or, for that matter, who this Proust fellow was." McPhee then related Bruni's fears that "all of us are losing . . . our 'collective vocabulary.' . . . Are the common points of reference dwindling? Has the personal niche supplanted the public square?" Bruni wondered.
Responding to Bruni, McPhee wrote, "My answer would be that the collective vocabulary and common points of reference are not only dwindling now but have been for centuries. The dwindling may have become speedier, but it is an old and continuous condition." There is truth to McPhee's point, of course. Up until the mid-Twentieth century, Greek and Latin languages (with all of the classical allusions they afforded) were requirements in the core curriculum of most American universities. Many core requirements have undergone further moderation by the first quarter of of the current century.
Today my 15-year-old granddaughter, Chloé, refers wryly to her parents, my wife, and me as "you people from the 1900s." Her generation, of course, is far more comfortable in their own world than in ours. Given the amount of time they devote to video games, films, and social media, it's safe to say they'll be well versed in allusions to the visual storytelling of cinema, Internet memes, and game and fantasy worlds. Beyond the digital sphere, the lyrics of Leonard Cohen's 1984 song "Hallelujah," alluding to the biblical stories of Samson and Delilah and David and Bathsheba, were reintroduced into the youth mainstream in 2021 by the soundtrack if the film Shrek. Like their grounding in Harry Potter in their youth, these worlds are a trove of such mythological and biblical allusions.
So perhaps there's hope after all for the preservation of a mutual cultural context, a reservoir of references to a common knowledge, familiar values, and a shared experience, even if they're different from our own. As social media has come to dominate the personal square and the collective vocabulary in 2025, our common points of reference are expanding visually as they contract textually. In an Instagram and Tik Tok world, digital memes and videos are ubiquitous today, forming a new collective "visual vocabulary" as common points of reference in the public square of the Internet. Perhaps as engagement in that communal space becomes more visual and interactive, we "people from the 1900s" need to be less critical and more receptive. After all, like Mark Twain's youth, we might be astounded by how much we can learn in a few years.
