George Steiner

There's love, there's beauty, uh, there's shiny things on the other side of that wall of the natural world, um poses to us and I suppose yeah Melvin and others around this time around this post-darwinian Epoch they start to think okay what if what if the thing behind the wall is actually is not benevolent maybe not completely evil but at any rate uh like somewhat indifferent to our fate

when you knock it just snaps back at you you know to try to find out like that yeah that's what happens in most of his texts i guess i'll just say to justify i feel like now i've presented emerson and melville i can maybe justify the american gnostic claim in some sense i actually find it to be like not that helpful and i just like i grew up reading bloom and george steiner and hans jonas who's another jewish scholar that should not and they always use this phrase to talk about american culture and i think you have to separate two ways you can to call something gnostic which is in the emersonian sense it is like a sethian text or like a valentinian text probably more is better to say where you just think that within yourself like you know when i said valentinus would preach without scripture and he didn't need apostolic tradition because he just had the divine within him.

Like that's what Emerson thinks.

Emerson thinks that a human being himself is, is Christ or it's God is, as you know, is as metaphysically, there's nothing metaphysically beyond human genius when you're really tapped into it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But Bloom and George Steiner and other writers that I critics like were up reading were always trying to kind of resurrect him.

It's a pretty short novel.

By the 18th century, Bach was putting on concerts in the cafes of Leipzig and even wrote a coffee cantata, which I have never listened to, but I'm going to after I record this.

The philosopher George Steiner went so far as to say that while there are cafes, the idea of Europe still has content.

So Spain was part of this continental phenomenon, but the Spanish and Portuguese tertulia has a distinct character, really.

The Italian academies kept records, had formal structures.

His most famous work, which is what you're describing right now, was the unsurpassed four-volume series written over 17 years on the Peloponnesian War.

And this is what essayist George Steiner noted as, quote, he said, "...the temptation to acclaim Kagan's four volumes as the foremost work of history produced in North America in this century is vivid," close quote.

And Joseph Manning, the William K. and Marilyn M. Simpson Chair in History and Classics at Yale, remarked, quote, despite the vast mountain range of scholarship on Thucydides and the war that has been published since Kagan's four-volume study, it remains required reading by all historians, close quote.

I've even seen references, and I don't know if this is hyperbole or where I found it, but they said that the work of Kagan on Thucydides was comparable to the work of Herodotus.