As a follow-up to my last post on David Bentley Hart's response to the "New Atheism" I can't forgo mentioning the work of
George Steiner. As readers of my books will know, I have drawn on his writing repeatedly. A good introduction to his work, and a short 2002 lecture by Steiner can be read
here (pdf). He is quoted in Elliott's introduction there as saying that central to his thinking "is my astonishment, naïve as it seems to people, that you can use human speech both to love, to build, to forgive, and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate." His books always amaze, challenge, entertain and provoke - I invariably learn from them. Of most significance to me in the last few years are
Real Presences and
Grammars of Creation.
Thanks for the link to the lecture - as someone obsessed by concepts, Steiner's encouragement of a return to music, architecture, and mathematics was a timely reminder!
ReplyDeleteBut also a wonderful meditation on art. I particularly liked, "the desire to last is, at a central level, that of a very natural and often vulnerable artistic vanity. It is that of a link with a transcendent belief now no longer available. In this light, it is both uncertain and blinding. It is in the light of these changes that we must together try and redefine the word literacy, even though in only the most provisional, tentative way. Anything else would be arrogance."