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     If one were to required to characterize the genus of
Steiner's Errata, one should have to categorize them as
elegies in prose; for they are not philology nor history nor
philosophy nor sociology nor psychology. They have all the
hallmarks of poetry.  They are, in fact, as if written for
the columns of the New Yorker, very sophisticated and erudite
entertainment for the elite, framed in spirit, if not on
paper, by elegant advertisements for jewelry, perfumes,
luxury cars and designer clothes to be promoted and sold.

     I suppose the circumstance that Steiner writes globally,
about everything, may be interpreted as a kind of oikeiosis,
as an attempt to comprehend, in the etymologic meaning of
that term, in order to find his home in the world, and to
become integral with it.  There is nothing wrong with that,
provided the reader understands that he is reading about
Steiner rather than about what Steiner purports to be
discussing, understands that Steiner, even in his description
of furthermost and outermost places, and especially there, is
writing about himself.

     It's not that I blame him for not being a specialist,
for not knowing almost everything about almost nothing.  I
notice only that he writes about what he has not experienced:
he writes about music which he cannot play. He writes about
concentration camps in which he has not been imprisoned.
Agreed that he has read the books which he cites, admitted
that he has studied them thoughtfully and meticulously; yet I
suspect they have remained outside him, remote from him
emotionally, or if you will, spiritually.  Except for the
introductory citations from the Iliad and from Berenice,
(which, significantly, were assigned by his teachers, not
chosen by him,) Steiner forbears to insert quotations into
his chapters.  He can write about Shakespeare and Milton,
about Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Heine and Rilke, without
reciting even a single line, not to speak of an entire poem,
that might haunt his memory. He deals with their works as
with packaged goods that he has had no time to open in the
past and that he has no time to open now.  And because he
writes so unabashedly about what was clearly not his, one is
not surprised that his own experience, which is what I would
have expected him to write about, appears only dimly if at
all.

     What is missing from this narrative, at least so far as
I have read, is the account of his compromise with the alien
barbaric culture of modernity into which he was thrust, the
account of his accommodation with academia, with the deans
and heads of departments, with fellow scholars, accommodation
with the professions, with the physicians and lawyers with
whom he has wrestled, with the governmental agencies that
seek to control his life; not to speak of what must have been
the awkwardness of his negotiations with the self-appointed
cultural aristocracy at the New Yorker Magazine.  Or should I
look at myself and ask whether with this complaint I do
anything more than to project onto George Steiner the
perplexities of my own existence and criticize him because I
have come to terms with those predicaments in a different
manner?


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Copyright 2006, Ernst Jochen Meyer
