“A Long Saturday” by George Steiner with Laure Adler

This is a short collection of interviews with the polymath Cambridge professor. Steiner is insightfully provocative with almost every word. As a European Jewish polyglot, forced to flee one home after another because of World War II, he abhors all tribalism and nationalism. “I believe that the Jew has a task: to be a pilgrim of invitations. To be everywhere a guest in order to try, very slowly, within the limits of our means, to make others understand that we are all guests on this Earth. To teach our fellow citizens in life that the art of being home everywhere, difficult as it may be, is essential. And to contribute to every community where we are invited to stay…. I believe neither in passports- ridiculous things- nor in flags. I believe strongly in the advantages of encountering the new.” On languages and literary works he meanders, “the death of a language is the death of a universe of possibilities…. When you and I are talking, we are constantly translating things within the same language: we are trying to understand each other. No one uses the same words in exactly the same way. There are as many words as there are human beings…. Every poem is a struggle with the word…. A great work is one that always, mysteriously, tells the reader at the end, “You must begin again. This was the first try. Let’s try again.”… We know nothing of the billions of thoughts that have been lost forever for lack of means of expression…. A book, a piece of music, or a painting says to me, “Change your life! Take me seriously. I’m not here to make your life easier.”… Common sense is the very enemy of genius. Common sense is what weakens irrationality, arrogance.” As a Jew, I was surprised to hear that Steiner reads Heidegger daily. “He believed in the renewal of Germany, and saw in Nazism the only potential movement he thought could resist the “two huge threats” of American capitalism and Russian communism. In my opinion, it was a stroke of genius to have understood long before anyone else that technology was the crux in both cases, and that American technocratic capitalism and Leninism/Stalinism were much closer to each other than they were to the classical spirit of Europe.” Although an atheist, Steiner has a healthy respect for religion and even regrets a world descending into secularism. “But a civilization without the possibility of transcendence- what Nietzsche calls the mysterium tremendum of man, what Heidegger (with caution) attempts to formulate- a civilization in which we can no longer say, like Wittgenstein, “If I could have, I would have dedicated my philosophical inquiries to God,” a civilization that has lost those possibilities is certainly, in my opinion, in serious danger…. If what Dostoyevsky calls “the only question” (that of the existence or nonexistence of God) isn’t worth considering anymore or we stop attempting to find formal metaphors to express it, then I believe we are entering what I call an epilogue, something that comes after the word, the logos. “In the beginning was the word.” Maybe at the end is derision.”