Poems are difficult to silence.
Stephen GreenblattTags: poetry silence censorship poems suppression
I am committed by trade to urging people to attend carefully to the verbal surfaces of what they read. Much of the pleasure and interest of poetry depends on such attention.
Stephen GreenblattIn short, it became possible - never easy, but possible - in the poet Auden's phrase to find the mortal world enough.
Stephen GreenblattTags: art auden renaissance
Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.
Stephen GreenblattTags: art renaissance swerve
A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.
Stephen GreenblattTags: art cervantes renaissance montaigne swerve
There was a time in the ancient world - a very long time - in which the central cultural problem must have seemed an inexhaustible outpouring of books. Where to put them all? How to organize them on the groaning shelves? How to hold the profusion of knowledge in one's head? The loss of this plenitude would have been virtually inconceivable to anyone living in its midst.
Then, not all at once but with the cumulative force of a mass extinction, the whole enterprise came to an end. What looked stable turned out to be fragile, and what had seemed for all time was only for the time being.
Tags: books renaissance
The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.
Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.
Tags: religion sacrifice child-sacrifice
Independence
Stephen GreenblattThe greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
Stephen GreenblattThe exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
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