Word: liking
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...store, despite looking like a more traditional bakery and cafe from the outside, will have a host at ground level to direct patrons either to the area where they can buy a bagel, or downstairs to order a sit-down meal from an expanded menu...
Reading Gnter Grass's recent Nobel Lecture I was struck by two things: it's rather disjointed--like it was written in a hurry--and it's wrong in a predictable way. The triteness of it took me by surprise. I haven't read any of Grass's books, not even The Tin Drum (heck, I haven't even seen the movie), but it was my understanding that he was one of the best living writers and that his Nobel Prize for literature was long overdue. Maybe so, but his Nobel Lecture strikes me as the sort of thing that...
...insinuations that the Nobel Prize is really not such a big deal and a conclusion that portrays literature as a heroic struggle for the future of the human race. None of this is very original, and in this case it does not gel together very well. Past Nobel Lectures like Saramago's, Garcia Marquez's and Faulkner's have done many of these things better and more coherently. But originality and style are minor points. It's the message that bothers me, commonplace...
...begin with, it's a gross misconception to claim that the Enlightenment was the work of writers. Writers might have advertised and propagated it, but the Enlightenment, like every single major transformation in history, was the work of scientists. It was the work of Descartes and Galileo and Newton and Leibniz and various French mathematicians whose last names begin with "L" (Laplace and Lagrange come to mind). It was they who showed that the "cold reason" of a science anchored in mathematics was capable of describing and predicting the workings of the universe with a precision previously undreamed...
Literature alone does not change the world, because it does not produce new knowledge. Human beings and their passions have not changed since the time of the Sumerians. Literature may apply and interpret the new knowledge but only science can produce it. Men of letters like Kant and Voltaire were commentators on a radical change in the way the West thought about humans and their world. Their influence was significant but the credit for initiating change does not lie with them...