Hamlet's Mother, Jonah, The Diary of Anne Frank, Sand County Almanac, All Quiet on the Western Front

[Markekohut]

>> On Sun, Jan 20, 2013 at 12:03 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
>>> Can literature or art in general promote empathy, wisdom, change, or is that just a nice dream we like to entertain ourselves with for a while?
>>> Generally people don't want to commit to answer this kind of question, reluctant to choose between the appearance of cynicism and the appearance of naivete' .
>>> 
>>> College age, searching for all the answers, I read Steiner 's Language & Silence. It had lotsa 
Intellectual press. Good Catholic-raised Puritan, I had ASSUMED getting ' the best that has been thought and said" made one a better person, a noble thing. Steiner wrote about those--many Germans in his examples, who read the best books and listened to the best music, cultured
enough to be "saints", so too speak, who still could .....be evil.  

I have spent too much mental time hoping Steiner was somehow wrong---maybe they didn't really 
READ, Feel, the meaning of the words, the music, but how to tell? 

And one learns writers can be almost-inhuman too---how can that be? (Some writers, of course) 

and lately, them there psychologists are showing how, in the young, stories and the characters in them do seem to develop something like identificatory empathy. 

But I still know nothing. 





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