A great emptiness

The alternatives are not reassuring: vulgarization and loud vacancies of intellect on the one hand, and the retreat of literature into museum cabinets on the other. The tawdry ‘plot outline’ or ‘predigested and trivialized version of the classic on the one hand, and the illegible variorum on the other. Literacy must strive to regain the middle ground. If it fails to do so, if une lecture bien faite becomes a dated artifice, a great emptiness will enter our lives.—George Steiner, No Passion Spent, page 19