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.
In a portrait, you have room to have a point of view. The image may not be literally what's going on, but it's representative.
Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.
The tango is a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration.
The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul.
Your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don't explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know absolutely nothing about, like a bassoon or a waterphone.
Because anybody can write, but not everybody invents new forms of writing. Gertrude Stein invented a new form of writing and her imitators are just "talents."
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