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From: reader
Category: Books
Date: 17 December 2004
Subtitled, Some Notes Towards the Re-definition of Culture. A stimulating slim book. i.e makes you think. Defines why in 1971 (a time when 1968 revolutionary rumbles and chaos seemed to foretell the end of the world as he knew it), when it was published, the idea of post-times had taken hold: high culture had retreated, 19th Century ennui had progressed to the slaughter of two world wars and the holocaust. Steiner has a pedant's way with words, and his intelligence disguises an underlying reactionary sneering about non-white male culture. Basically he is depressed that Mozart and Goethe and Beethoven and Shakespeare didn't make us all good people, and that people care less about their masterpieces which he loves. He can't convince because his empathy is limited to European people and their ideas, but in his attempt he gives an inkling of the problem.
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