Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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He Is] the ideal dilettante and therefore, granting the impossibility that there could be such a thing, the perfect critic. Except in a perfectly managed autocracy, language declines, and too much should not be made of the relationship between scrambled thought and imprecise expression…. This much, however, I do know: it would not be a mind at all if its owner had allowed his multiplicity of interests to be restricted by a formula.

In it he records, with a dazzling display not just of his hallmark aphoristic, witty and penetrating style, but, more importantly, the incredible range of his reading over a long, productive life of cultural commentary. Key quote, “Only chance could save you”, from her universally praised (by GR friends) Hope Abandoned. Answering that question over and over in the course of long days and longer nights, I had to intensify a faith that I had always kept throughout my writing life: the faith that the unity would come from the style. English is this new world’s lingua franca, not because it was once spoken in the British Empire but because it is spoken now in the American international cultural hegemony. There was a time when I could fairly fluently read Russian, and get through a simple article in Japanese about my special subject, the war in the Pacific.The usual division is to treat our daily job as the adventure and our cultural diversions as a mere mechanism of renewal and repose. Though he did his best to be humble, there were many in his audience who thought him not humble enough.

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in 1938, Friedell saw the storm troopers marching down the street, on their way to the building in which he had his apartment full of books. James attempts to lard them with so much inner irony and “surface” paradox, that this reader was stopped dead in his tracks, fruitlessly attempting to decipher what James is saying, and over and over failing to understand what it is that he is so damned pleased about. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

It is refreshing to discover some unusual figures in history that have escaped broader attention yet still had a measurable impact, for good or ill. Zweig was one of the foremost proponents of the liberal humanism, the internationalism, the commitment to freedom through culture, that James strongly advocates. This international bestseller is an encyclopedic A-Z masterpiece--the perfect introduction to the very core of Western humanism. It's a pity that he seems to have felt it was inappropriate, because when it does emerge, in his lighter moments, the sentences can really come alive. Each time this scene is set, he then tells the reader that he really should learn the language of the original work.In these aphoristic and richly provocative short essays, Clive James offers a crash course in civilization—and the assault on civilization—in Europe of the twentieth century. Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, it is the work of a man who, even after a lifetime of reading in several languages, can accuse himself of never knowing enough but still feels bound to hand down what he knows to a new generation already facing the same hard questions about whether humanism can survive the threat of the forces ranged against it. But to really make this work, about a quarter of the essays, the ones which don't bear on this subject, would need to be cut. But aside from one 8 word quote from “Requiem”, James’ narrative about her focuses on (1) her heroic stand against the tyranny of the state, and (2) “the beautiful incarnation of pre-revolutionary Petersburg” and “she was a femme fatale” and “love for her broken-nosed beauty was a common condition among the male poets”. bogged into the theme mentioned above over and over, but I at least began having questions about the relation between culture, ideology, science – and whether many of the issues James brought up are not, nowadays, major downsides of his beloved American hegemony.