To bring order -- this has been the motivating impulse behind the life of Jacques Barzun. Enjoying an exceptionally long career, Mr. Barzun has achieved eminence as a teacher, author, social and cultural historian, critic and savant of the arts and letters of civilized man, to a degree matched by hardly anyone else. Tracking down and clarifying the best of thought so that others may go on to use it in creating further order in their own lives, and transferring these principles to unpuzzling the arts, unraveling the pattern of the contemporary scene, helping to keep the language clear, improving the present view of the past -- these are the things which Mr. Barzun has done with consummate grace, deftness and skill.
This has marked him as one of the leading and most distinguished 20th-century authorities on the very best that man has thought and accomplished. Coming in his teens to the United States from his native France just after the First World War, Mr. Barzun began in the 1920s his 48-year teaching practice at Columbia University. Over the years, he has produced a prodigious number of books, essays, and articles dealing with the various aspects of the world of ideas and the arts.
Among the books are "The Energies of Art," "Darwin, Marx, Wagner," "Classic, Romantic and Modern," and "The Use and Abuse of Art." He places great faith in the idea of university as originally conceived. He is concerned that its role be preserved, in the purest pursuit of great ideas which in fact have immense practicality -- in enhancing the quality of one's thinking, as well as one's ability to learn, judge and organize. On this subject and others, he talked recently with David Owens, the Home Forum's assistant editor, in Mr. Barzun's office at the Scribner publishing house in New York City, where he acts as literary consultant.
Fonte: Hacker News · Resumido por HeadlinesBriefing