Recent stories of note:
“Promethean Ambitions”
Sanjana Friedman, City Journal
Speaking in late June in Presidio Heights to a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the sculptors Missor and Massoud, a team of brothers who run the Paris-based foundry Atelier Missor, presented the idea of a twenty-meter titanium statue of Prometheus at SpaceX’s Starbase in Texas. Sanjana Friedman writes in City Journal that Atelier Missor seeks to move their foundry to Austin or San Francisco to build “gigantic titanium statues [that] will lead us to a beautiful future.” They believe that a revival of classical sculpture is “essential (or at least conducive) to civilizational flourishing.” Granted, the pair has no government support or private backing yet. During the questions-and-answer session with the local entrepreneur Pablo Peniche, Missor fielded questions about how exactly these statues would be built from titanium. While laying out the manufacturing process he proposes, Missor offered that the appeal of titanium is that it can’t be destroyed, recalling, according to Friedman, instances of statues being defaced in 2020. Currently, their website features no work that matches the scale of this vision, but perhaps Missor and Massoud’s dream of revitalizing Western civilization through indestructible classical statues is just quixotic enough for some Silicon Valley visionary to latch on to.
“A stanger in his own land: Henry James returns to the United States”
Alicia Rix, The Times Literary Supplement
Henry James had resided in England for many years when he decided to revisit America and, in 1903, embarked on a journey that became the basis for a book, The American Scene (1907). Alicia Rix, writing in The Times Literary Supplement, notes that while James’s travel writings focused mostly on his impressions of New England and Florida, he visited the Midwest and California as well. Both a literary study of James’s work and a reconstruction of his ten-month journey, Peter Brooks’s new Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering American in the Gilded Age sheds light on James’s insights. Brooks illuminates the everyday struggles the novelist endured—including gout and dental problems—along with thematic chapters on how James encountered a more advanced, industrial country than the one he left. He also includes an amusing treatment of James’s rather snobbish remarks on American vernacular.
“Total Power, Total Depravity”
Algis Valiunas, National Review
According to Algis Valiunas, writing in National Review, Hannah Arendt’s legacy today is reduced to an ill-advised affair with her professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and with her coining the infamous phrase “banality of evil” in her writings on the 1961 trial of the Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. The problematic nature of this phrase and the way it has diluted our understanding of evil should not be dismissed, as Douglas Murray has argued in The New Criterion. Valiunas hopes, however, that the Library of America’s newly published Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism, Expanded Edition, can call attention to a more redeemable part of her legacy. Much to the consternation of her liberal colleagues who wished to see the Soviet project as noble at least in its aims, Arendt wrote about how the Soviets used class hatred to control their people just as the Nazi regime used race hatred to control theirs. Whatever the complexities of Arendt’s legacy, Valiunas celebrates that we may be able to look at The Origins of Totalitarianism anew.
