This work is eleven untitled essays. My titles:1) A Decisive Childhood2) Judaism and Wittgenstein3) A French Lycée in New York4) University of Chicago5) Why Have the Jews Survived?6) What is Music? What Does it Do? Where is it From?7) What is Language? How Are they Different?8) Why and How Did 1914 Change the World Forever?9) Pictures of Teachers10) Pictures of Places11) The Conjunction of the Future and Love is MessianicThis short book,190 pages, is dense. Produced when almost seventy, seems written as solace. Explains, justifies, apologizes, criticizes, remembers, wonders and teaches. Facinating writing by a facinating scholar.The first chapter presents his earliest beliefs. "I have conducted my emotional, intellectual, and professional affairs in distrust of theory. . . . The invocation of "theory" in the humanities, in historical and social studies, in the evaluation of literature and the arts seems to me mendacious. . . . Coleridge does not refute Samuel Johnson; Picasso does not advance on Raphael. . . . My persuasion that the current triumph of the theoretical in literary, historical, sociological discourse is self-deception, that it enacts a failure of nerve in the face of the prestige of the sciences." (6)He recognizes others see his work as "archaic impressionism".Chapter two describes his father and his prescient fear of Nazism. A prominent Jewish banker in Austria, he believed what Hitler said. He moved to Paris. . ."Hitler's speeches, when broadcast, punctuated my childhood." Asks a profound question: "How can a human voice cast a huge, sickening shadow?" (8)The Judaism of his father "breathed rationality, the promise of the enlightenment and tolerance. . . . This Judaism of secular hope looked to German philosophy, literature, scholarship, and music for it's talismanic guarantees. German metaphysics and cultural criticism, from Kant to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. . .crowded the shelves of my father's library." (10)What an unbearable paradox!"There was scarcely a museum in Paris and later, in New York, to which he did not take me on a Saturday. It is in this instinctive preference for teaching and learning, for the discovery and the transmission of truth that my father, in his aching stoicism, was most profoundly Jewish." (12)Chapter four covers his time at University of Chicago. Leo Strauss lectures above his head. "I vowed to try again. And again. This is the point. To direct a student's attention towards that which, at first, exceeds his grasp. . . . Simplification, leveling, watering down, as they now prevail in all but the most privileged education, are criminal. They condescend fatally to the capacities unbeknown within ourselves. Attacks on so-called elitism mask a vulgar condescension: towards all those judged 'a priori' to be incapable of better things." (50)Not admired today. He loved it!Chapter five offers two questions:"Why are the Jews hated? Why have the Jews survived?" Steiner answers deserve respect, maybe even acceptance. Why genocide? "The purpose, honestly stated by Nazism, was ontological. It was the wiping from this earth of Jewish being. The unborn had to be murdered. The non-negotiable guilt of the Jew was that of existence. . . . Yet how disproportionately radiant has been the Jewish contribution. That of the Hebrew Bible and of the ethics which burgeon from it is incommensurable." (58)The special place of the Jewish God offends."Alas, I cannot feel myself a party to a contract with Abraham. . . . Nonetheless, the enigma, the singularity of the survival of the Jew after the Shoah, persuades me of a purpose. Isreal is an "indispensable miracle". . . . Normalcy would, for the Jew, be just another mode of disappearance." (60)Exile is a "greater calling." Astounding thought from a secular Jew.He thinks the ideas of the Hebrew prophets will never die. "Yet, no serious aspect of the Jewish problem, of the history and life of the Jew, can ever be divorced altogether from the theological and the metaphysical." (63)Steiner says that the Jews have introduced "three moments of transcendent imposition on man" (65)First Moses and the Decalogue.Second, Jesus and the sermon on the mount.Third, utopian socialism, notably in its Marxist guise."Hitler put it bluntly: 'The Jew has invented conscience.' After that what forgiveness?" (68)"The vocation of the 'guest', the aspiration to the messianic, the function of the moral irritant and insomniac among men, does strike me as an honor beyond honors." (69)Who wouldn't agree?The last chapter laments the loss of faith. Even Socrates and Plato believed in their gods. Even more, belief moved Augustine, Pascal, Newton, Kant, Dante, Tolstoy, Descartes and Einstein. . ."No Bach, no Beethoven, no Michealangelo without it. . . . But if one is at liberty to choose one's company, that of believers is of overwhelming distinction." (181)Steiner has no problem, like a spawning salmon, going against the current. He is returning to where he, and perhaps everyone, started. This erudite scholar presents conclusions from painful examination, of both himself and the world.I think his insights command respectful consideration.Fascinating.Astounding.Profound.Difficult.Enlightening.What more can anyone ask for?