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

[Paul Mackin]

On 1/20/2013 3:04 PM, Markekohut 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.

The trouble is, intellectual progress in writing and music tends to be 
about expanding the self,  not about curbing our natural appetites for 
plunder and rapine.

Remember Gustav's preference for Beethoven over Rossini.  The 
incorporating of more and more notes into the scale, musical freedom.  
(Bird would agree)

  Is it any wonder that "all you feel like  listening to Beethoven is 
going out and invading Poland." (sez Saure)

P


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