Jacob Burckhardt: How little he discouraged you, despite his acceptance of Schopenhauer!
You owe a great deal to Burckhardt:
His rejection of any system derived from history
His sense that nothing had gotten better but, on the contrary, worse
His respect for expressiveness of form, as opposed to pure conceptuality
His warm feeling for life truly lived, nourished by the tenderness of his renunciation
His unprettified knowledge of the Greeks
His resistance to Nietzsche, an early warning for me.
The shadow that lay upon Burckhardt’s thought was not cast by feeling. His enthusiasm was reserved for particular things. If some have withered, others retain their significance. One need not accept him. One cannot dismiss him.
There is no historian of the previous century for whom I feel such unreserved admiration.
In the years of preparation, when I read the most diverse things in order to lengthen the road to Crowds and Power, I appeared to be lost in an ocean of reading. People who learned of this situation thought me obsessed; even my best friends offered tactful advice. They said it was pointless to read nothing but primary sources; the great ancient books had been sifted a thousand times and been reduced to a few lasting insights. All the rest was ballast. Getting rid of superfluous material, they said, was paramount in any major undertaking.
But I kept rowing rudderless in my ocean and did not let myself be deterred. I had no justification for this attitude—until I came across the following sentence:
“It is possible that Thucydides, for example, contains a fact of prime importance that will not be noticed until a hundred years from now.” This sentence appears in the introduction to Reflections on World History. My most intimate debt to Burckhardt, my justification for those years, is that sentence.
The Secret Heart of the Clock
Elias Canetti
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