The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
Simon SchamaRead
What can art really do in the face of atrocity?
Interpretation
The quote questions the impact of art when confronted with extreme acts of violence or suffering.
Simon Schama's quote reflects a deep philosophical inquiry about the role of art in society, particularly in the context of human atrocities. It suggests that while art can evoke powerful emotions and provoke thought, its ability to address or mitigate the profound suffering caused by such events is debatable, prompting contemplation of art's limitations and purpose in the face of reality's harshness.
In practice
In a discussion about the role of public art in memorializing tragedies.
The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.
In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.
Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation - but rather, for the vast majority, the adventure of living in between.
I understood when I was quite small that there were two special things about the Jews. That we'd endured for over 3,000 years despite everything that had been thrown at us, and that we had an extraordinarily dramatic story to tell.
History is admirably dangerous. It is not the soft option. Teachers need to be grown up and brave. Sensitivity is fine, but it stops at the door of honest narrative.
History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.
I'd rather have just one person who reads and feels my work deeply than hundreds of thousands who read it but don't really care about.
Middle-earth is our world. I have (of course) placed the action in a purely imaginary (though not wholly impossible) period of antiquity, in which the shape of the continental masses was different.
I cannot life for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. I forget too easily how it was, and shrink to the horror of the here and now, with no past and no future. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web.
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
If you like my poems let them _x000D_ walk in the evening, a little behind you
Music is love searching for a word.
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