A Culture for All
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A Culture for All The Ideal of Culture: Essays, Joseph Epstein, Axios, 2018, pp. 572, $17.49 hardcover. Dan Asia # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
A prolific essayist and short story writer, Joseph Epstein has collected many of his most recent writings in a new book, The Ideal of Culture. The title is taken from the first of the book’s many essays, which vary from two to ten pages in length. Some of the essays are written to make us laugh, and in doing so make us aware of our human fol ly. Ot her e ssays a re more conversational or academic in tone. Epstein has written thirty books and countless articles, reviews, and stories. While going to a good college—the University of Chicago—he didn’t learn enough, Dan Asia is an American composer whose work ranges from solo pieces to large scale multimovement works for orchestra and includes six symphonies. Since 1988, Asia has been Professor of Composition and head of the composition department at the University of Arizona in Tucson; [email protected]. He wrote “Front and Center: The Place for Western Classical Music in the Curriculum” for our winter, 2018 issue.
and at some time in his life realized this and decided to do something about it. Kind editors along the way made it possible for him to be a public intellectual, which he denotes as a very inquiring person who takes the public along on his educational journey. Writing for Epstein is itself “an act of education,” less so an act of creation. Having an aversion to cliché and boredom, he finds that he has to “discover a new and interesting way to write about the subject. It is only in making the attempt to do so that I often come to realize that I knew things I didn’t realize I knew.” In this collection he writes about the likes of Mimesis by Erich Auerbach, Isaiah Berlin, Michael Oakeshott; Shalom Aleichem, Gershom Scholem, Jewish Pugs (boxers not dogs); or masterpieces such as those written by Machiavelli or Gogol; on aging; or works on culture, like “Cool, The Sixties” or “Death Takes No Holiday.” This description summarizes the five sections of the book and gives the reader a sense of the range of his interests. The actual sections of the book are: The Culture, Literary, Jewish, Masterpieces, and Hitting Eighty. Delightfully, Epstein is not a
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specialist, but finds interests far and wide, in different large rooms, and in their nooks and crannies. His essays often help us think about a topic we haven’t contemplated or encountered before. His essay on grammar raises the question of whether I should have ended the previous sentence with a dangling participle. Definitely not in the Epsteinian realm; in the (Steven) Pinkerian mode, why not? Another is on the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, who thought “[s]cientists, historians, politicians, economists, and poets all perceive the world through . . . their separate mode of experience. And each of these modes, in the nature of the case, was partial, incomplete, only part of the story. . . . What there is . . . is conversation
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