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James Gardner captures the eccentricity, flaws, and brilliance of George Steiner in a short piece in the June 15 issue of the Weekly Standard <\/em> . <\/p>\n His weaknesses are manifest \u2013 Steiner is \u201can unapologetic know-it-all and acrobatic show-off\u201d given to \u201cincessant posturings in print.\u201d Gardner describes his usual modus <\/em> as one of \u201chyperventilating conviction, elevated, intellectualized, and incessant.\u201d I would only add that writing like a know-it-all is easier when you know as much as Steiner does. He makes an illuminating comparison of Steiner and de Maistre, but notes that Steiner wears his pessimism so lightly and so long that he has become \u201cso comfortable in his lugubrious dissent as to be oddly heartened by it.\u201d <\/p>\n But he also notes that Steiner recognizes that the \u201cdefining, immovable truth of modern times is the rise of totalitarianism in Germany and Russia . . . and the West\u2019s dysthmic response to it.\u201d Steiner\u2019s \u201cabiding reverence for words\u201d and his \u201crare sense of style\u201d give him an ability to \u201csummon the syntactical powers of English\u201d beyond his contemporaries. <\/p>\n Above all, he commends Steiner\u2019s selection of the writers that mean most to him: \u201cIt is here that Steiner\u2019s [tragic] reverence for the exile, the displaced person, the \u2018depayse,\u2019 reaches its fullest fruition. Most people who take letters seriously view their native literature with a parochial, even tribalistic sense of proprietorship, just as they regard foreign literature as \u2013 foreign.\u201d Not Steiner: Since he is \u201cnowhere a native, it follows that he is foreign to no culture, at least no European culture.\u201d <\/p>\n Gardner also observes that Steiner is almost along among contemporary critics in being \u201cspectacularly ambitious.\u201d For Steiner, \u201ceverything is always at stake in all of his writings, as though history and the future of mankind itself hang in the balance . . . . You have only to read a few salvos of his prose to understand just how spare are the aspirations of most of his latter-day colleagues of the scribal class, just how little faith they have in the power of words to do anything more than meet a deadline.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" James Gardner captures the eccentricity, flaws, and brilliance of George Steiner in a short piece in the June 15 issue of the Weekly Standard . His weaknesses are manifest \u2013 Steiner is \u201can unapologetic know-it-all and acrobatic show-off\u201d given to \u201cincessant posturings in print.\u201d Gardner describes his usual modus as one of \u201chyperventilating conviction, elevated, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"yoast_head":"\n