Norman Mailer תורה

A few weeks ago Newsweek did a feature on Barney Rosset, the literary champion of the avant-garde whose Grove Press, בזמנו, published Beckett's Waiting for Godot in '54 when no one else would. The article itself is worth reading (and speaks to the de-avant-gard-ization of the arts which, depending on your interpretation, speaks either to the leftward move of America or to the right's ability to coopt the radical and new) but this gem near the end has been on my mind since I read it:

When talking about the major obscenity trials of the mid-19th century, Norman Mailer once said, "There's a wonderful moment when you go from oppression to freedom, there in the middle, when one's still oppressed but one's achieved the first freedoms. By the time you get over to complete freedom you begin to look back almost nostalgically on the days of oppression, because in those days you were ready to become a martyr, you had a sense of importance, you could take yourself seriously, and you were fighting the good fight."

My (weeks) in-progress post on Natan Sharansky will shed more light on an implication of this.