What I wanted to do was to get that sense of being in touch with this lost world while holding onto what draws readers and audiences there in the first place.
Interpretation
The quote expresses a desire to connect with a forgotten era while maintaining the elements that attract audiences.
Stephen Greenblatt's quote reflects the tension between nostalgia for a lost world and the need to engage contemporary readers and audiences. It suggests an aim to evoke the essence of a past time, capturing its richness while ensuring that the storytelling remains relevant and accessible to modern sensibilities.
In practice
During a lecture on the importance of historical context in literature.
I've been at this for 40 years. And, as an academic, I've been content with relatively small audiences, with the thought that the audience I long for will find its way eventually to what I have written, provided that what I have written is good enough.
What matters here are the works - finally without them his life would be uninteresting. What matters, that is, are the astonishing things that he left behind. If we can get the life in relation to the works, then it can take off.
The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.
Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.
The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion.
I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.
What did it mean for a black woman to be an artist in our grandmothers' time? In our great-grandmothers' day? It is an answer cruel enough to stop the blood.
Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual.
Because of how much movies cost, it's dangerous to be experimental on one film after the other. But we can experiment with television. We can do things that are fringe and bring ideas to the table that are offbeat and original.
I think that if we really want to break it down, that non-black filmmakers have had many, many years and many, many opportunities to tell many, many stories about themselves, and black filmmakers have not had as many years, as many opportunities, as many films to explore the nuances of our reality.
My heart is in my/ pocket. It is poems by Pierre Reverdy.
The music is really about sharing an experience. That's why we call it Stay Human. It's like we're sharing this genuine human exchange.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.