Here's something about on-line writing. It's always the afterthought, the thrown-off idea that sends ripples thru the pond. Turns out my best post last night was the Beckett post on love of the Irish people. My friend Mark, a Catholic, responds:
2. Nevertheless, cultures, not all-too-fallible individuals, ultimately nurture, maintain and pass on what is valuable in the human spirit. A paradox, if you will. Cultural love and pride without narcissism and with tolerance for analogous human efforts.
Innaresting. I'm a fallible individualist. Yet I know that like other frogs, I look back fondly on the pond where I tadpoled.
And this just in: In a letter to Max Brod, a Zionist writer, in 1917, Kafka wrote that with respect to "the existent or prospective community of our people… I have not acquitted myself well, and moreover I have failed in such a fashion–I know from close observation–as has no one else around me."
It is clear that Kafka, who lived in a Jewish/Zionist world, failed for the same reason that Arendt and Beckett failed in this same regard 20 and 40 years on during the history of European nationalism: because they were writers seeking to serve humanity, not just a subset of humanity. And isn't it interesting that each of these writers made his/her disclosure of failure in a letter to a nationalist friend: Max Brod, Gershom Scholem, and Thomas McGreevy. All writers themselves–and none nearly as memorable as the failure.
