Summary
In the Introduction to Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, the troubling element from which the outsider writers Said was drawn to — Conrad, Merleau-Ponty, Cioran and Vico — could neither ignore nor escape to a promontory outside (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.15-16).
Details
- Except for Maurice Merleau-Ponty, those writers were outsiders whose insights were achieved at great expense as they struggled with sometimes overwhelming and threatening circumstances which they could neither ignore nor elude, nor escape outside what Said calls worldliness (PDF p.15-16).
- Said’s own more superficially worldly concerns are sharpened and deepened by music’s cross-fertilization with the immediacies of ordinary experience, with Adorno as his model (PDF p.25).
Related pages
Historical experience, Exile, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays