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 would wish my portraits to be of the people, not like them. Not having a look of the sitter, being them.
I wanted to write a show about an estate that wasn't sad or morbid, like a lot of shows portray working class life to be.
Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising.
There's something inimical about the camera and song.
I went into performing for the community. Being backstage with your company of fellows is the best part of working in live theater. That energy, that combined focus, the synergy - it's addictive.
First you study photography, then you practice photography, then you serve photography, and finally one becomes photography.
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