Thanks for your thoughts, I am very interested in both of the things you mention. While it's dangerous to memorize precise answers, as your comment shows there

Thanks for your thoughts, I am very interested in both of the things you mention. While it's dangerous to memorize precise answers, as your comment shows there are many good habits of thought worth remembering. They don't provide an answer, but they lead us to think about the question in a new way. A lot of faerie takes have that quality, where there isn't a clear moral but you learn something anyway. And sometimes they are helpful even if irrational. Certainly that is the case when you are looking for consolation or hope in a bad situation. Next, many of us still communicate in allusions, just to a new canon made up of The Simpsons, internet videos, or pg essays. Every community has its canon, it's just a question of how we will learn to share it. Online communities like HN have done a very good job of creating this idea of a body of writing that the community is expected to know, and this is only going to get more popular (and the communities more specialized) over time.