Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: There are, I suppose, always signs around us that an era is ending, that another one is beginning, and so on-that there is some kind of meaningful discontinuity to the transitions that we are always experiencing.We are inveterate narrativizers of our lives and times.That impulse is the stimulus that produces not only historiography and arguably all other intellectual labor as well but the "I" itself, the narrating self.We "are" (i.e., seem to ourselves and others like) "coherent" selves because we so obsessively turn our moment-tomoment experiences into stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.I write this on the day the term of the first would-be fascist president of my country ends.All around me, everywhere in the world, COVID-19 still rages, and we all worry that we will never travel freely again.There are, in other words-always-plenty of pressing reasons to identify the present moment as the end of an era.But for me personally the death of George Steiner on February 3, 2020, was another major moment of closure.I didn't know
DOI: 10.52116/yth.vi1.28
Author: Douglas Robinson
Institution: Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W3208549524