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.
Authors are far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere brains to tell them so
The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.
What has happened to architecture since the second world war that the only passers-by who can contemplate it without pain are those equipped with a white stick and a dog?
It’s as hard to explain as a sexual proclivity. Some guys like high-heeled shoes. I like horror.
The essence of my lyrics is the desire for peace and harmony. That's all anyone has ever wanted. How could it become outdated?...We are trying to communicate a fulfilled ideal...I am a reflection of what I sing. Sometimes I have to get serious because the things I've been through are serious...The way I see it, rock n' roll is folk music.
Music and rhythm find their way into the secret places of the soul
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