Show Notes
“When it comes to thinking about the era of the Second World War and the Holocaust, we’re nearing the end of the twilight of living memory,” says Jeremy Eichler in this week’s episode of The World in Time. “Pretty soon, there will be a time when not a single living soul on our planet has firsthand lived experience—felt contact with this particular world, these historical events. And our ways of accessing and understanding them will be exclusively passed toward dealing with different aspects of the historical record. I wanted to invite readers to join me in thinking about how music as an art form can actually burn through history’s ‘cold storage.’ Unlike another book on the era, music itself can release into the present something of the raw emotion of these earlier lives and earlier eras in order to allow for an expanded contact with the now. When we have an older work of music played again in the room right before us, we’re hearing in a very literal way the past speaking again in the present. In that sense, music is the language of time’s non-linearity and brings these distant moments closer to us.”
This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Jeremy Eichler, historian, former chief classical music critic of The Boston Globe, and author of Time’s Echo: Music, Memory, and the Second World War, which considers the lives and the works of Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Benjamin Britten. Eichler practices what he calls “deep listening.” Traveling to places associated with musical war memorials written by each of his four composers, he returns “these works to history, not for their sake but for ours, so that they may become, among other things, a prism through which we ‘remember’ what was lost.” Audio excerpts of works by Bach, Schoenberg, Strauss, Shostakovich, and Britten punctuate the conversation.
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More from The World in Time / Lapham’s Quarterly
“Hannah Arendt has been sanitized in a certain way now, as a kind of wise Jewish figure,” says Benjamin Moser on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “In Germany, she’s probably the most read Jewish philosopher. Germany, with all its censorship of anti-Zionist viewpoints, has kind of adopted her. There’s a Hannah Arendt Strasse in every town in Germany. There will be, you know, a little statue of her as this nice Jewish lady. But this happens, unfortunately, to a lot of really explosive artists and writers. They get sanitized.”
“Friendship is an enormous part of my life, and it was an enormous part of Arendt’s life,” Roger Berkowitz says on this week’s episode of The World in Time. “She was said to have a genius for friendship by her friends. She was an exile, stateless for eighteen years, and she really did come to believe that friendship is what she called a ‘homeland.’ She didn’t think of herself as German, or Jewish, or American, or European. She said, ‘The only people I love are my friends.’ Friendship is hard, and she uses this beautiful metaphor. She says, ‘Friendship exists on the knife’s edge.’”
“Rabbi Luria’s Kabbalist creation story, however baroque, accounts boldly for both moral evil and natural calamity,” Annie Dillard wrote in her 1999 book, For the Time Being. “The creator meant his light to emanate, ultimately, to man. Grace would flow downward through ten holy vessels, like water cascading. Cataclysm—some say creation itself—disrupted this orderly progression. The holy light burst the vessels. The vessels splintered and scattered. Sparks of holiness fell to the depths, and the opaque shards of the broken vessels imprisoned them. This is our bleak world.”
As a companion to last week’s episode of The World in Time, we are sharing with listeners the first episode of Passages: On Morrison, a limited podcast series hosted by Namwali Serpell. The series takes the form of a traveling salon. In this first episode, Serpell and poet Tracy K. Smith read the opening of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison's debut novel, and discuss all that the passage emits and erases. They also explore how the cultural treatment of Morrison as a literary icon or monument has obscured a true appreciation of her literary form, an appreciation that comes from turning to the page. Lapham’s Quarterly brings voices from the past up to the microphone of the present. Back issues are available for purchase on our website. To make a tax-deductible gift, visit the donation portal hosted by Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. You can find information about the Quarterly’s ongoing revival here. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
“The canon raised Toni Morrison,” says Namwali Serpell on this episode of The World in Time. “The canon is how she became who she is. Faulkner, Woolf, Shakespeare. She is much more interested in taking what’s there and reading it accurately, honestly. Let us be clear-minded and clear-sighted about what is there. But we don’t need to destroy it. And in fact, the Melville I read after reading Morrison’s analysis of the whiteness of the whale is a richer Melville.”