Greenberg

I’m entertaining more and more seriously Robert Jackson’s claim that Clement Greenberg could be the best 20th century writer. There are a number of candidates for that honor, but the power that Greenberg packs into one or two sentences is really hard to beat. Every morning in recent weeks, what literally makes me happiest is the thought that I’ll be able to read 4 or 5 more of his mini-essays on the bus ride to campus.

I was going to call his writings “a feast,” but that’s obviously the wrong metaphor. A feast implies abundance, whereas Greenberg serves up small but exquisitely prepared portions of prose. An even better metaphor, which I’ve used before, is wine-tasting. Reading Greenberg is like doing a vineyard tour with someone who really knows what they’re talking about.

These volumes of collected criticism have been around for quite awhile, since the 1980’s I believe. And I saw them in a bookstore in Iowa City as early as 1995, but didn’t think to buy and read them. That’s too bad, because I was probably ready to appreciate them even then.

There are certain authors we aren’t ready for until a certain point. For example, Heidegger would have meant little to me at age 13, and I tried and failed to read Being and Time at 17 and 18. But at 19 I was ready for it and plowed straight through. It took me until deep into my thirties to appreciate Plato fully, since I used to be annoyed by what seemed like the back-and-forth chatter over pious-sounding topics such as virtue and justice (Nietzsche: “Plato is boring”); others like him much sooner.

Then there are other authors where you just know you would have been ready for them much sooner, and really wish you had gotten down to business much sooner. I could have been reading Latour 6 or 7 years earlier, for example.

It’s like that with people, too. There are people who would have left little impression on you if met any earlier or in a different context, and then there are others you really should have known decades earlier and it’s tragic that you didn’t.