Imperdível entrevista com George Steiner na edição de hoje do The Guardian.

Destaco esta passagem, que me diz muito. Um misto de modéstia e vaidade, que define, a meu ver, o verdadeiro Professor (e há tão poucos por aí!):

Unless you are absolutely first rate [as a writer/poet], which so few of us are, then what I call the letter-carrier function of the teacher is wonderful. To serve great works, to send the letters out hoping they get to a good mailbox, is a marvellous thing. I’m terribly proud, of course, of being in the National Portrait Gallery. I’m even prouder that they’ve named a room for me at the University of London. A lovely portrait there, and I’ve insisted that it be called Il Postino. That beautiful film of the mail carrier for Neruda . . . I am the postino. And what fun it’s been, and what luck. I have students who are now in chairs in five continents. They invite me to their inaugurals. A tremendous reward."

Not that the mail he brings is always consoling. "No culture has a pact with eternity," he says. "The conditions which made possible the giants of the western poetic, aesthetic, philosophic tradition no longer really obtain." Steiner doesn’t believe "there can be a Hamlet without a ghost, a Missa Solemnis without a missa", and if you say that the questions addressed by religion are "nonsense or baby talk or trivial, I don’t believe that certain dimensions will be available to you. Particularly today, when the atheist case is being put, if I may say so, with such vulgarity of mind."