Procrustes Stretched
"intuition and imagination and intelligence"
"In an essay called “Our Homeland, the Text,” Steiner used the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem as a poignant example. A beautiful exhibit in the Israel Museum houses the famous Dead Sea Scrolls, Jewish manuscripts dating back over 2,100 years found in Qumran. Steiner pointed out that there is a security system in place that, in case of attack, that will sink the texts underground, protecting them from incoming bombardment. “Words cannot be broken by artillery, nor thought live in bomb-shelters,” Steiner writes. To acknowledge the Shrine of the Book as just that, a shrine, is to lose sense of what is truly important in the realm of Jewish ideas and writings: that they cannot be lost in a physical attack." - from the link (free, paywall is down for a period of time)
I do not know what to say here about Steiner, the man, nor do I believe there is much I should say. Steiner was such an intellect, it's almost impossible to comment on him personally without...
I believe this calls for a musical interlude:
Toward the end of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche criticized Euripides for making tragedy an optimistic genre by use of the device, and was highly skeptical of the "Greek cheerfulness", prompting what he viewed as the plays' "blissful delight in life".[30] The deus ex machina as Nietzsche saw it was symptomatic of Socratic culture, which valued knowledge over Dionysiac music and ultimately caused the death of tragedy:[31]
Opinion | George Steiner’s profound criticism of Zionism will haunt us forever
In my own mind Steiner will perhaps live on forever as elucidating one of the greatest and most profound critiques of Zionism.
forward.com
I do not know what to say here about Steiner, the man, nor do I believe there is much I should say. Steiner was such an intellect, it's almost impossible to comment on him personally without...
I believe this calls for a musical interlude:
Toward the end of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche criticized Euripides for making tragedy an optimistic genre by use of the device, and was highly skeptical of the "Greek cheerfulness", prompting what he viewed as the plays' "blissful delight in life".[30] The deus ex machina as Nietzsche saw it was symptomatic of Socratic culture, which valued knowledge over Dionysiac music and ultimately caused the death of tragedy:[31]
But the new non-Dionysiac spirit is most clearly apparent in the endings of the new dramas. At the end of the old tragedies there was a sense of metaphysical conciliation without which it is impossible to imagine our taking delight in tragedy; perhaps the conciliatory tones from another world echo most purely in Oedipus at Colonus. Now, once tragedy had lost the genius of music, tragedy in the strictest sense was dead: for where was that metaphysical consolation now to be found? Hence an earthly resolution for tragic dissonance was sought; the hero, having been adequately tormented by fate, won his well-earned reward in a stately marriage and tokens of divine honour. The hero had become a gladiator, granted freedom once he had been satisfactorily flayed and scarred. Metaphysical consolation had been ousted by the deus ex machina.
— Friedrich Nietzsche