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

[Markekohut]

By the way, I think TRP throws off a variation of Steiner's answer in AtD (at least; that book that contains everything) with that luxury cruise ship that turns into a battleship. He suggests the cultured ( by implication) bourgeoisie's complicity in the horrors of war. 

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On Jan 20, 2013, at 3:04 PM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
>>> 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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