Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time

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From the evidence of this book, he must have done nothing but read for twelve hours a day every day for the past fifty years.

This book alone has determined me to get to grips with all manner of novels, essays and verse, by the likes of Witold Gombrowicz, Egon Friedell, Montesquieu, Alfred Polgar, Karl Kraus, Heda Margolius Kovaly, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Jean-Francois Revel, Raymond Aron, and a holy host of others; and that's merely scratching the surface.A lifetime in the making, Cultural Amnesia is one of the crowning achievements in Clive James's illustrious career. It might seem a pity to break pieces off their finished work, but I think the integrity of their concentrated effort can only stand revealed more clearly. To read him is to bask in phrases and sentences which flow without a single dud line, exemplifying the "art that conceals art".

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.

To make matters worse, James dedicates the whole book to Scholl, and yet he spills five times more ink on Tony Curtis. It would be organized like the top of my desk, from which the last assistant I hired to sort it out has yet to reappear. The mind is the one collectivity that the free individual can thrive in: which is lucky, because live in it he must. I hope to get Russian back, but the written version of Japanese is the kind of language that you can study hard for five years and yet can’t neglect for a week without its leaving you like a flock of birds.

But aside from one 8 word quote from “Requiem”, James’ narrative about her focuses on (1) her heroic stand against the tyranny of the state, and (2) “the beautiful incarnation of pre-revolutionary Petersburg” and “she was a femme fatale” and “love for her broken-nosed beauty was a common condition among the male poets”. The format is of fairly concise biographical essays around key historical and cultural characters of modern history and weaving meaningful stories and historical, literary and philosophical insights around them.as a riposte to a young woman who complained “that his interest in her was based only (nur) on sexual attraction”. Thomas Mann, with the family poodle snuffling petulantly at his knee, would rather not talk to Brecht, and Sartre is keen to avoid Solzhenitsyn.

It would be a desirable and enviable existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. In the job we can have a profile written about us, and be summed up: all the profiles will be the same, and all the summaries add up to the same thing.Cultural Amnesia, with its encyclopedic length and organization and the intense jostle of its ideas, is to be dipped into over weeks and months. But although Hitler and Stalin both talked like maniacs from the start, Mao was capable of something like human reason early in his career; a fact to remind us that the merely verbalizing villains—those benighted intellectuals who truckled to power—were not always without a spark of reason. followed with “Nobody ever wrote a more unaffectedly elegant English; he stands at the height to English prose; its hundreds of years of steady development culminate in him. The most obvious sign is when he over and over says something like “the student would do well”, as if we his readers are “students” fawning at the feet of he the master teacher. What is a “perfectly managed autocracy” and when has said entity even existed, let alone prevented the decline of language?