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

[Markekohut]

I think it was. 

Sent from my iPad

On Jan 20, 2013, at 7:48 PM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I too have considered Steiner's ideas and other similar lines of reason.  It clearly discredits the idea that artistic cultivation alone is of use in resisting the evils of scapegoating and aggression etc.   Perhaps the only good thing to come out of WW2 is the opportunity to try to understand what shaped those Germans Italians etc. who actively resisted Fascism along with those who behaved altruistically toward the victims and also those everywhere who  foresaw  and warned against its essential nature. And if there has been any progress toward humane values in any society we have to ask what was the role of language in that transition.  What had to be changed and what was the role of the arts in doing that?
> 
> The heart of what I am trying to say in the course of this exchange is that if we fail to see our own culture's moral failures and misdeeds  and  if we fail to  confront and correct what is most directly our responsibility , then any moral claims we make are self flattering nonsense, because that is the only place that it really matters in a practical sense. 
> 
> The blunt truth gets very ugly here. I t is not just Germans who murdered millions using a combination of lies, racism, ignorance and greed. Gooks, ragheads haji's, redskin heathens, commies, greasers jungle bunnies, niggers, papists, micks, chinks, uncivilized..... we all know the language that  goes with our own aggressions as we all know the extent of those aggressions.  What we fail to confront is the connection between Vietnam or Iraq and the self flattering story we tell about WW2 and American militarism since that time. 
> 
> Does not a single Pynchon reader think this was a central part of the intended effect of Gravity's Rainbow?    
> 
> 
> 
> On Jan 20, 2013, at 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. 
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>