Thoughts for the Day

 I'm listening to an online course about Ancient World Literature. One of the topics is about Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. One part of the discussion struck me so much.

"The time has come for the epoch of world of literature. And everyone must seek to accelerate it." -Goethe

Goethe said this to Johann Peter Eckermann.

I could not blame Eckermann's ignorance at that time. After all, not to mention the prejudice, the boundaries of nations and kingdoms, separated by distance and the language barrier were still hard to cross at that time. There's a limited number of translated novels one could acquire and they could only readily read the works written in the language they're familiar with. There were only a few people like Goethe who would cross the norms and explore a wider horizon and touch the vast knowledge outside the usual.

Sadly, though. It's been centuries since Goethe said these words. The distance barrier has long been solved, and thousands of novels had been translated from different languages all over the world. Even so, the prejudice that's keeping people from exploring the beauty of world literature continued to exist even in this day and age when everything has been easily accessible with the help of the internet.