Trilling's Importance

Adam Kirsch on Lionel Trilling:

He knew that literature's victories are always achieved against the larger circumstance of defeat, that to live a literary life--which also means, to live life according to the disciplines of literature--is itself the best, most inspiring resistance to an unliterary culture. And his writing, by showing what it means to define one's self through reading, proves that this kind of readerly heroism is always a possibility for those who believe in it. The most important reason why Trilling matters for our time is that he helps us, to quote his own praise of the sociologist David Riesman,

to assert what in our day will seem a difficult idea even to people of great moral sensitivity--that one may live a real life apart from the group, that one may exist as an actual person not only at the center of society but on its margins, that one's values may be none the less real and valuable because they do not prevail and are even rejected and submerged....That this needs to be said suggests the peculiar threat to the individual that our society offers.

~ Why Trilling Matters, pp. 167-168.