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Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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A little edge-rubbing to DJ, minor surface wrinkling to spine ends of DJ, VG+, bright and unmarked internally. But if you're interested in learning something of what he's picked up from a lifetime's reading – not least about the art of writing a brilliant sentence – then Cultural Amnesia is a whole rich continent waiting to be explored. It's this approach which has led to James's much commented-on demonization of Jean-Paul Sartre, who is ‘a devil's advocate to be despised more than the devil’, ‘the most conspicuous example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization’. Still, there is sometimes a sense that his veneration of clarity, while refreshing, can be misleading. I think it is fitting, given James's central themes, that his final sketch before his conclusion is one of Stefan Zweig, whose memoir The World of Yesterday I just reviewed.

In that sense, the best sense, there is no such thing as an individual voice: there is only an individual responsibility. If it can’t be sorted into satisfactory categories, that should make us take heart: it wouldn’t be the work of human beings if it could.Persistent hectoring about languages, yet more bragging: Nobody will ever accuse Clive James of wearing his learning lightly.

But there were always annotations that struck me as not fitting any scheme except a much larger one, to be attempted far in the future, probably towards the end of my life. Older but even more ambitious, I had the temerity to define prose in the same way: a prose work of whatever length should be dependent, in each part, on every other part of what was included, and so respect the importance even of what had been left out. This arbitrary arrangement, which looks on the surface to be so rigorously thought-out, vexes the reader and leads to a feeling that despite certain claims to a unifying cultural vision, there is rather ad hoc approach to the project.The future of science, Renan’s cherished avenir de la science, can be assessed from our past, in which it flattened cities and gassed innocent children: whatever we don’t yet know about it, one thing we already know is that it is not necessarily benevolent. For a more detailed critique of the Introduction: James tells us that throughout his reading and writing career, he made “annotations” which seemed to be beyond a narrow subject, belonging to a “scheme” which could perhaps be approached far in the future, perhaps near the end of his life. If the humanism that makes civilization civilized is to be preserved into this new century, it will need advocates. And in quoting them he shows why they should be remembered and why cultural amnesia is a continuing danger.

e., the Nazi occupation of France) a few too many times, and sometimes it feels like he is intentionally dredging up obscure figures merely to show that he can -- but perhaps his "necessary memories" are a little different than i would choose. There is a moment in the Bond film You Only Live Twice where Moneypenny throws Sean Connery a teach-yourself-Japanese book before he leaves for a mission in Tokyo. They don’t contribute to “culture” or “humanism” (at least not often), but they frequently promote/elevate the male in his sublime creation of these things - through the romantic aura which the initial sexual attraction somehow softens into. But even here, James ruins things by making more out of this heroism and idealism than it can carry, and moreover digressing for two plus pages about how, if an American movie were it to made, it would HAVE to star Natalie Portman, then going on about his own infatuation with Portman blah blah … James has no choice but to refer to Scholl as “Sophie”.Too often used for ill, it is now asked about its use for good, and usually on the assumption that any goodwill be measurable on a market, like a commodity.

Other names will be more obscure: Miguel de Unamuno, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Leszek Kolakowski, Golo Mann, Arthur Schnitzler, Witold Gombrowicz, Manès Sperber, Raymond Aron, Hans Sahl, Jean Prévost, Stefan Zweig.

We know what he doesn’t: that in the twentieth century the story of Sejanus’s daughter will be repeated several million times. Whether you agree with him or not about Portman, in James’ ardor, poor old guillotined Sophie Scholl gets lost in the Hollywood gush and semi-amateur movie casting. Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, it is the work of a man who, even after a lifetime of reading in several languages, can accuse himself of never knowing enough but still feels bound to hand down what he knows to a new generation already facing the same hard questions about whether humanism can survive the threat of the forces ranged against it. Even when I was rather enjoying a few pages of one of these essays, a feeling kept lurking in the background that James expected me to be taking notes - both so I wouldn’t forget the pearls of wisdom he was scattering, and so I wouldn’t forget who gifted them to me.

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