Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers

Culture: The Price You Pay

George Steiner Culture: The Price You Pay RK: Do you believe that there is such a thing as the "whole mind of Europe"? GS: I believe that there is in the history of Europe a very strong central tradition, which is by no means an easy one to live with. It is that of the Roman Empire meeting Christianity. Our Europe is still to an astonishing degree, after all the crises and changes, that Christian Roman Empire. Virgil was taken to be, rightly or wrongly, the prophet of this empire, and Dante the great incarnation. It is very striking that when General de Gaulle, who really used to think hard about these things, was interviewed and asked, "Are there three or four authors who are Europe to you?" he said immediately, without hesitating, "Of course, Dante, Goethe, Chateaubriand." The astonished interviewer, having fallen like an elephant into the pit, said, "What, Monsieur? No Shakespeare?" And the icy smile came, "You asked me about 'Europe.'" In that joke there is a deep Roman Christian truth. RK: Do you believe in de Gaulle's notion of a great Europe extending from the Atlantic to the Urals, as the slogan goes? GS: Let me answer honestly, not to make a joke, but out of deep conviction: if you draw a line from Porto in western Portugal to Leningrad, but certainly not Moscow, you can go to something called a coffeehouse, with newspapers from allover Europe; you can play 205 chess, play dominoes; you can sit all day for the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of wine; talk, read, work. Moscow, which is the beginning of Asia, has never had a coffeehouse. This peculiar space,........,of discourse , of shared leisure, of shared exchange of disagreements,........, by which I mean the coffeehouse, does define a very peculiar historical space roughly from western Portugal to that line which runs south from Leningrad to Kiev and Odessa. But not east of it and not very far north. RK: This culture of the coffeehouse you speak of would appear to be located only in certain European cities? GS: Yes. The shared culture we have is the culture of the citied. I mean, it strikes me that Europe is essentially a constellation of cities which no other place on earth, no other civilization, not even the United States, has ever known. When you come to think of the Muslim cities, for instance, they are all holy shrines. They are tied to religion, with the results we know. When you come to think of American cities, they look to me, except for a few of them, like settlements, just put there on the large wide expanses, plains and so on, with no heart, with no core in them, and everybody living in the suburbs and so on, and the city just being the sky line. But when you come to Europe, what strikes you immediately is the great diversity of all the cities, each one with its historical moment of grandeur, its historical past being engraved in stone, and there to be admired. And, therefore, this is our sharing; this is what we have in common. We all of us have developed and evolved from the cities, from the Italian cities and from the Flemish cities. RK: But couldn't one object that it is precisely the European cities that are quintessentially national,........, Paris as the epitome of France, London the epitome of England, Dublin the epitome of Ireland, Rome the epitome of Italy, that these are expressions of nation states, not of some pan-European culture? GS: Paris is the epitome of a national city. But I would say that Paris is an exception. My theory is that France, and Paris as representative of France, are exceptions in Europe, and the French will be a long time becoming aware of that; they will probably have to change their ambitions and to rethink their nation, their sense of nationality, in order to adjust to the new European demands. But as soon as you mention Rome, I start smiling, because immediately I think of Venice and Milan, which are as diverse as possible, as different as possible from Rome, and which opposed themselves in the first place to Rome. 206 • George Steiner What about Florence as well? What is now happening is that cities are reemerging, as it were, taking over from nations, and entering...