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.
I think there are advantages to different scales of filmmaking. You wouldn't want to do just one thing.
I'd started going to acting classes at 14, played 'Medea' at 15 and really wanted to be a classical actress.
There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.
It's taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. I'm not a musician. I never thought of performing in a rock n' roll band. I was just drawn in. It was like being called to duty - I was called to duty, and I did my duty as best as I could.
Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.
What entrepreneurs and artists have in common is that they give the world something it didn't know it was missing.
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