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March 18, 2010
learning by heart
The complex dialectic of letter via spirit, which underlies our tradition, even at its most secular, of the cleric, of the scholar, derives from the traditions of Scripture and inscription. The two words, of course, are cognate. My I remind you what the word underwritten means? Underwritten is re-insured by the theological: what Wittgenstein says on completing his investigations, “If I could, I would dedicate this book to God.” That’s Wittgenstein. The magnum opus in the Western traditions, “Le livre qui est le but de l’univers” of Mallarmé; or in Borges, a simulacrum of the book that simply calls itself the Book, the Bible. In certain traditions, Judaism for example, the notion of secular authorship, of reading for pleasure, comes very late. It arrives only with modernity and it leaves the greatest of all Jewish writers, Franz Kafka, radically uncomfortable. The arts of memory are correlative with those of all higher literacy. They constitute the bridge between the oral and the written. Plato fears writing precisely because it will enfeeble the muscles of memory; hence, the central, crucial, irreplaceable role of learning by heart. What you love, you start learning by heart.
George Steiner
Posted by amin at March 18, 2010 6:34 AM