August 22, 2006
George Steiner on "the idea of Europe" in The Liberal
Last week I came across a copy of The Liberal, a newish journal of "poetry, politics, and culture." The issue, dated July/August 2006, is only the magazine's eighth, and yet its contributor list sparkles with the bright lights of the intellectual set: Harold Bloom, George Steiner, and Terry Eagleton are all featured.
Aside from desperately needing a copyeditor (before I gave up, I counted fifteen mistakes in the first thirty-six pages, and I'm not the sharpest eye), it's a pretty strong magazine. I enjoyed John Burnside's short story, Niall Griffith's essay on writing in the Balkans, Shena Mackay's essay on synaesthesia, and the letters from Patmos and Mauritius. Bloom's review of Philip Roth's Everyman seems phoned in and Eagleton's review partisan back-scratching; only Steiner's essay, originally delivered as a lecture at the Nexus Institute in The Netherlands, appears to have occasioned much effort by its author.
Steiner offers five "axioms to define Europe: the coffee house; the landscape on a traversable and human scale; these streets and squares named after statesmen, scientists, artists, writers of the past; our twofold descent from Athens and Jerusalem; and, lastly, that apprehension of a closing chapter, of that famous Hegelian sunset, which shadowed the idea and substance of Europe even in their noon hours." The fourth trait may be the most provocative, but I most enjoyed reading the tail end of the second and the beginning of the third third, in which Steiner's at his most romantic:
In an American age, which is that of the automobile and the jet, we can scarcely imagine the distances covered and put to intellectual and poetic purpose by European masters. Hölderlin goes on foot from Westphalia to Bordeaux and back. The young Wordsworth walks from Calais to the Berner Oberland and back. Coleridge, a portly individual, with various physical afflictions, routinely covers twenty to thirty miles per diem across difficult, mountainous ground, composing poetry or intricate theological arguments as he does so. And think of the role of the wanderer in some of the greatest of our music: in Schubert's fantasies and songs, in Mahler. Again [Walter] Benjamin's enigmatic prophecy comes to mind: throughout European allegory and legend, the beggar who comes to the door, the beggar who may be a divine or daemonic agent in disguise, has come on foot.The streets, the squares walked by European men, women and children are named a hundredfold after statesmen, military figures, poets, artists, composers, scientists and philosophers. This is my third parameter. My own childhood in Paris found me taking, on numberless occasions, the Rue La Fontaine, the Place Victor Hugo, the Pont Henri IV, the Rue Théophile Gauthier. The streets around the Sorbonne are named after the high masters of medieval scholasticism. They celebrate Descartes and Auguste Comte. If Racine has his street, so do Corneille, Molière, Boileau. The same is true of the German-speaking world, of the myriad Goetheplätze and Schillerstrassen, of the squares named after Mozart or Beethoven. The European schoolchild, urban men and women, inhabit literal echo-chambers of historical, intellectual, artistic and scientific achievements. Very often, the streetsign will carry not only the illustrious or specialised name, but the relevant dates and a summary description. Cities such as Paris, Milan, Florence, Frankfurt, Weimar, Vienna, Prague or Saint Petersburg are living chronicles. To read their street signs is to leaf through a present past. Nor has this pietas in any way ceased. The Place Saint-Germain has become the Place Sartre-Beauvoir. Frankfurt has just named an Adornoplatz.
He goes on for some time, and then summarizes:
The genius of Europe is what William Blake would have called "the holiness of the minute particular." It is that of linguistic, cultural, social diversity, of a prodigal mosaic which often makes a trivial distance, twenty kilometers apart, a division between worlds. In contrast to the awesome monotony which extends from western New jersey to the mountains of California, in contrast to that lust for sameness which is both the strength and vacancy of so much of American existence, the splintered, often absurdly divisive map of the European spirit and its inheritance has been inexhaustibly fertile.