A Long Saturday: Conversations

"Interestingly George Steiner used to teach Nuccio Ordine, so there is a connection between the two. The subtitle of A Long Saturday is “Conversations.” This is also one of the reasons I wanted to mention this book, because the quintessence of humanism is to have conversations. There is a deep connection between communication and ‘communio,’ community. Sitting together, eating together, drinking together, talking together. When people stop talking to each other, then you get into war. It’s the notion of an ongoing conversation—a real conversation and not this Facebook or Twitter nonsense. You sit together and have a glass of wine, if you like wine, or something else—I don’t care. Now, this is where “Conversations” comes in. Probably it will be Steiner’s last book, as he’s not been in very good health, already for a while. Is it his most important book? No, it’s not. But George, for me, is one of the last real, European humanists—as a literary critic, as a cultural philosopher. “There is a deep connection between communication and ‘communio,’ community. Sitting together, eating together, drinking together, talking together.” His approach, again, is the opposite of academic prose. Whether it is his book Language and Silence , in which he wants to explore what is happening in a society, where we can no longer speak, where the inexpressible becomes really inexpressible. Or his book Real Presences , which is very important, with its quest on what gives meaning. What is meaning? What is the meaning of meaning? It sounds like a very abstract, philosophical question, but then try to imagine a situation where you realise that ‘This is meaningless.’ That drives people crazy—because we are beings who are in need of meaning, whatever we do. Whatever life we live, we want things in our life to be meaningful. But what is meaningful, or what gives us meaning? The opposite of meaningful is this huge escapism which has been created by the kitsch society—the world of mass media and games and drugs or whatever. A Long Saturday is a beautiful, intellectual testament of a great European humanist. It’s a reminder what civilization is all about, why book culture is important and what the world of Judaism has to offer to the world. Why life is a quest. So for me, again, is it the greatest book on the world of humanism? No. But for anybody who doesn’t know George Steiner, I hope this book will be an introduction to read the great books that he wrote. Yes, George is crippled in his right hand. They start the conversation with the story of his mother telling him that it is an advantage because now he will not have to go into the army. I know George Steiner quite well. He’s not the most easy person that I’ve met. He’s very tough. But he’s especially tough on himself. He has an independent mind. So the whole sense of, you have to conform to the academic elite and ‘I put you in my footnotes, so you can put me in your footnotes’—that’s not George. He wrote books on Antigone, about Hitler, The Portage to San Cristobal. All these books are very powerful and, for me, almost timeless reminders of what it means to be European, what it means to be a humanist. What the true meaning of the life of the mind is about and what liberal education is all about. And why our sense of European civilization will disappear at the very moment that we have forgotten how to read books. They are extremely parochial. There are so many things they do not know. I have the good fortune to live in the Netherlands and we have many, many books, which are translated into Dutch because Dutch is a very small language. Germany is the door to the world of central Europe. But in America, I don’t know the exact figures, but not that many translations are done. Fortunately, you still have the Library of America and Everyman’s Library . Once upon a time, we had great publishers like Peter Mayer…but I don’t have to tell you what’s going on in the world of publishing. It’s in a terrible state. All these things relate to the larger picture and the larger picture is that we are losing our sense of this European humanism. That’s why the subtitle of my book on Nobility of Spirit is “A Forgotten Ideal.” History has seen many periods of decline and fall but, fortunately, it is also full of periods of renaissance. As long as we are free to speak and as long as we are free to read, we have a moral obligation to contribute to this sense of renaissance. It happened before, so it can happen again."