Stephen Greenblatt: I'm reading Hans Kummer's "In Quest of the Sacred...

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Stephen Greenblatt

warfare legacy force

Through reading literature we can make ghosts speak to us, and we can speak back to them.

Stephen Greenblatt

reading literature ghost

The first and perhaps the most important requirement for a successful writing performance - and writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig - is to understand the nature of the occasion.

Stephen Greenblatt

dancing successful writing

Literate households in the 17th century would have had the Bible, John Bunyan's "The Pilgrim's Progress," and a couple of other books. Shakespeare plays were cheap, so you could buy those, but a folio cost a pound, which was an incredible amount of money then.

Stephen Greenblatt

couple play book

The Shakespeare that Shakespeare became is the name that's attached to these astonishing objects that he left behind.

Stephen Greenblatt

left-behind behinds names

I believe in broken, fractured, complicated narratives, but I believe in narratives as a vehicle for truth, not simply as a form of entertainment, though I love entertainment, but also a way of conveying what needs to be conveyed about the works that I care about.

Stephen Greenblatt

care broken believe

I believe that it is a whole lifetime of work on Shakespeare's part that enabled him to do what he did. But the question is how you can explain this whole lifetime in such a way to make it accessible and available to us, to me.

Stephen Greenblatt

lifetime believe way

There's a huge amount of work on Adam and Eve, from the ancient world to the present. Saint Augustine was obsessed with them.I don't know if it helps my research, but I get a big kick out of Mark Twain, who wrote "The Diaries of Adam and Eve." He wrote very funny stuff on them. I sometimes read things that are loosely related to what I'm thinking and writing about.

Stephen Greenblatt

saint writing thinking

Now a Protestant confronting a Catholic ghost is exactly Shakespeare's way of grappling with what was not simply a general social problem but one lived out in his own life.

Stephen Greenblatt

catholic ghost way

Poems are difficult to silence.

Stephen Greenblatt

difficult silence

Writing is a performance, like singing an aria or dancing a jig

Stephen Greenblatt

singing dancing writing

When I was quite young I came across a collection of [Franz] Kafka stories and read "The Judgment." I was just floored by that story. I couldn't understand it. I still don't. I'm talking about something I read more than 50 years ago. That story left a little scar on me.

Stephen Greenblatt

stories talking years

It is not that Shakespeare's art is in technicolor and fancy, and that real life is black and white and tedious. The life that Shakespeare was living was the only life he had, and he had to use it to create what he was doing.

Stephen Greenblatt

black-and-white real art

I believe that nothing comes of nothing, even in Shakespeare. I wanted to know where he got the matter he was working with and what he did with that matter.

Stephen Greenblatt

matter wanted believe

First of all, Shakespeare is about pleasure and interest. He was from the first moment he actually wrote something for the stage, and he remains so.

Stephen Greenblatt

pleasure moments firsts

I was in Venice teaching, so I reread Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." I love James.

Stephen Greenblatt

venice teaching wings

But I never listen to music while I'm writing.

Stephen Greenblatt

listening-to-music writing

First of all, there was a volcano of words, an eruption of words that Shakespeare had never used before that had never been used in the English language before. It's astonishing. It pours out of him.

Stephen Greenblatt

eruption volcanoes firsts

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.

Stephen Greenblatt

swerve psychics art

A comparably capacious embrace of beauty and pleasure - an embrace that somehow extends to death as well as life, to dissolution as well as creation - characterizes Montaigne's restless reflections on matter in motion, Cervantes's chronicle of his mad knight, Michelangelo's depiction of flayed skin, Leonardo's sketches of whirlpools, Caravaggio's loving attention to the dirty soles of Christ's feet.

Stephen Greenblatt

knights reflection dirty

I'm reading Hans Kummer's "In Quest of the Sacred Baboon." It's wonderful. It's a scientist's journal about baboons, but it relates to the search for human origin.