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AUTHORS FOR A NEW AGE

gaither stewart

A veteran journalist, essayist, and internationally recognized novelist, Gaither Stewart serves as The Greanville Post European correspondent. His latest novel is Time of Exile (Punto Press), third volume in his Europe Trilogy, of which the first two volumes (The Trojan Spy, Lily Pad Roll) have also been published by Punto Press. These are thrillers that have been compared to the best of John le Carré, focusing on the work of Western intelligence services, the stealthy strategy of tension, and the gradual encirclement of Russia, a topic of compelling relevance in our time. He makes his home in Rome, with wife Milena. Gaither can be contacted at gaithers@greanvillepost.com.

Jan 062016
 
Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)

=By= Gaither Stewart

The Editor-in-Chief and the Managing Editor of The Greanville Post, of which I am an editor, have informed me that I now have my own column on our satellite site, Punto Press, the literary (press) arm of The Greanville Post Group. Punto Press is also the publisher of several of my books, which are discussed, analyzed and advertised on this same site. I have been told that I can write here anything I want here: fiction, non-fiction, reviews, thoughts, ruminations, meditations, absurdities and stupidities.
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Jan 012016
 

horiz grey line


=By=  Gaither Stewart
(Rome)

Hubris in ancient Greek referred to excessive behavior or lack of measure, transgressions for which the gods punished offenders.

Hubris referred to actions that humiliated the victim for the pleasure of the abuser. In modern usage, hubris means extreme pride, a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one’s own capabilities, usually of persons in positions of power. Political writers apply it also to groups and in a special way to the United States of America and its leaders. Personally I try to avoid words which are being widely used, sometimes, it seems, at random. When I use the word hubris I have in mind the meaning of arrogance; in any case I intend a despicable quality.

An expressive Greek word I have come to love is hamartia. The meaning I attach to the word is a character FLAW. Though hamartia, especially in ancient Greek literature, is a negative quality that leads to tragic consequences, I also use hamartia as a character weakness such as drug or alcohol addiction, a flaw to be overcome after a life-and-death struggle, a struggle, if won, that molds and strengthens character. I conceive of hamartia as a necessary quality in a positive literary protagonist or in a hero in real life. The person you love and admire most has most probably struggled and overcome his hamartia, which most of us have somewhere in our being.

Though ancient Greeks as a rule applied these dramatic words to the individual—Antigone’s flaw was her stubborn loyalty for which she paid with her life—we today apply these words also to entire societies or nations. We can label Europe’s hubris its Eurocentrism; its hamartia (for which the ancient Greeks would perhaps punish it collectively), is its destructive nationalisms on the one hand, and its contemporary subservience to America on the other. Continue reading »

Dec 132015
 

 

By Gaither Stewart

Moravia: Moravia stressed that the writer is obliged to be extreme. No great writer, he says, was not extreme. That is, sincere. Can one think that Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Ibsen, were not extreme, that is, sincere, in the deepest sense of true to themselves?

Moravia: the writer is obliged to be extreme. That is, sincere.


 

No more than you can choose the age in which you live, can you live without the age in which you are born; we are all children of our times … and to some degree consonant. The laws of the age of science and technology demand agreement if not homogeneity as a condition of existence: to work and exist means to collaborate within a system in which the actions of each are prescribed. Action is homogeneous when it conforms to the requirements of the system.

Nonetheless, the goals of the apparatus are not those of the individual. Personal conscience is easily reduced to conscientiousness in the execution of one’s duties from which is born the concept of conformist conscience. The result is the hegemony of “behavioral psychology of adaptation”—to be increasingly less oneself and more like everyone else. Technological society works against individuality—and for homogeneity. (The above is an adaptation from readings in Lionel Trilling’s Sincerity and Authenticity.)     

Being different is not only non-remunerative but also arouses suspicion. The paradox is that authenticity—being oneself or knowing oneself, which wise men have long prescribed—in the conformist society becomes pathological behavior, as if being oneself were a disease.         Continue reading »