Thursday 26 April 2007

George Steiner: The Death of Tragedy



For Steiner, tragic drama is a uniquely western achievement. In Judaism, sin causes disaster; to the Greek disaster lies beyond reason or justice.

Elizabethan tragedy coincided with the loss of early Renaissance optimism. Yet after Racine, tragedy was in decline with the rise of the bourgeoise and its love of happy endings.

The Romantics blamed man's misery not on Fate but on archaic social structures. Their optimistic redemptive mythology was inimical to tragedy.

Rationalism marks the death of tragedy, breaking man's sense of continuity with a divine realm. Novels present the new ideology to a private middle class audience.



Key Quotations

  • To the Jew there is a marvellous continuity between knowledge and action; to the Greek an ironic abyss. The legend of Oedipus, in which the Greek sense of tragic unreason is so grimly rendered, served that great Jewish poet Freud as an emblem of rational insight and redemption through healing. (p. 7)

  • Having repudiated classic notions of evil in man, Victor Hugo and his contemporaries replaced the tragic by the contingent. (p. 164)

  • The classic leads to a dead past. The metaphysics of Christianity and Marxism are anti-tragic. That, in essence, is the dilemma of modern tragedy. (p. 324)


George Steiner (b. 1929)


Monday 23 April 2007

Matsuo Basho: The Narrow Road to Oku



In 1689 the poet Basho wrote his famous fifth travel diary describing his spring and summer journey with Sora, his companion, into the northern hinterland of Japan. The narrative is studded with haiku commemorative of things seen or felt, of the blossoming moment in nature and society, the joys and discomforts encountered.

The peaks of clouds
Have crumbled into fragments -
The moonlit mountain.


Plagued by fleas and lice,
I hear the horses staling
Right by my pillow.


Printed on high grade paper, this edition is translated by Donald Keene and beautifully illustrated with colourful paper cut-outs by Miyata Masayuki.





Key Quotations

  • The months and the days are travellers of eternity. The years that come and go are also voyagers. Those who float away their lives on ships or who grow old leading horses are forever journeying, and their homes are wherever their travels take them. (p. 19)

Matuso Basho (1644-1694)

Miyata Masayuki (1926-1997)

Donald Keene (b. 1922)

Thursday 12 April 2007

Patrick Leigh Fermor: A Time of Gifts



In December 1933 Patrick Leigh Fermor, aged eighteen, set out to walk from Rotterdam to Istanbul. This volume ends at the Danube and is compelling recovery of a middle-aged writer's youthful zest and engaging curiosity.

Handsome, charming, erudite, blessed with a gift for languages and inspired by a Latin anthology, Fermor was befriended by many whose hospitality weakened his resolve to "sleep in hayricks... shelter in barns... and only consort with peasants and tramps". Entertained by a string of eccentric, elegant, educated and aristocratic hosts, he gained an insight into a world soon to be utterly destroyed by war.



Key Quotations
  • I wanted to think, write, stay or move on at my own speed and unencumbered, to gaze at things with a changed eye and listen to new tongues that were untainted by a single familiar word. (p. 13)

Patrick Leigh Fermor (b. 1915)

Wednesday 4 April 2007

Eric Hoffer: The Ordeal of Change


Where opportunities abound change releases energies, breeding confidence in self-reliant men. Without opportunities and self-reliance people turn to faith, pride, unity, Hoffer argues.

Hoffer attributes the ferment of the West since the Renaissance to the intellectual's hunger for recognition. Intellectuals, given authority, plan, guide and manage; to them it seems absurd that autonomous individuals would be addicted to work, yet work provides the easiest path to self-esteem.

Paradoxically, rapid modernization requires imitation, not indivualism.

Man is playful; crises induce him to turn his toys to serious use. Man is born unfinished; finishing himself he refashions his world.




Key Quotations

  • Where there is the necessary skill to move mountains there is no need for the faith that moves mountains. (p. 4)

  • Where things have not changed at all, there is the least likelihood of revolution. (p. 6)

  • One cannot help thinking that were the Moslem missionary to combine his religious preaching with technical know-how - Islamization with industrialization - the spread of Islam might again become phenomenal. (p. 19)

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983)

http://chironthecentaur.blogspot.com/