Van de Schoonheid en de Troost — Season 1, Episode 4: The Code of Pasternak: George Steiner
Documentary • 80 min • 1 season, 27 episodes
Episode synopsis
Interview with George Steiner, British literary critic and writer (in his home in Cambridge, Great Britain). Steiner talks about beauty, solace, fear, wonder, memory, his photographic memory and the extinction of collective memory: the fact that readers no longer recognize references in literature. In this context, Steiner reads a fragment from Ernest Hemingway's 'Fiesta: The sun also rises'. He also talks about Chinese wisdom following the excavation and reburial of terracotta statues from graves in Szetsjwan in China, Pasternak's code, the work of Sören Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, the innumerability/beauty of detail, the painting 'The Reading Philosopher' by Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, falling in love, love and friendship, his passion for art, literature, music, philosophy, love for animals, humanity, self-knowledge, Franz Schubert, the dark side of life and atrocities such as those committed during the Second World War.
About Van de Schoonheid en de Troost
To his guests – artists, scientists, writers, philosophers and musicians – Wim Kayzer in Of Beauty and Consolation asks the philosophical question: What makes this life worth living?
More episodes from Season 1
- E1Fathers Roses: Wole Soyinka
- E2Homecoming: Roger Scruton
- E3Alone on the mountain: Jane Goodall
- E5The End of the Thirteenth: Vladimir Ashkenazy
- E6Thor, Newton, Einstein: Steven Weinberg
- E7Guilt: Martha Nussbaum
- E8You Are There and You Are Not: Karel Appel
- E9The Greatest Mystery Is Not the Universe: Edward Witten
- E10Dear Mother: Elizabeth Loftus
- E11When My Father Was Still Big: Rutger Kopland
- E12What's Mary Doing in the Cave: Gary Lynch
- E13John the Myth: Stephen Jay Gould