Consider three exhibits from George Steiner’s latest book, Real Presences. Exhibit A: “The root-phenomenology of the journalistic is, in a sense, metaphysical. It articulates an epistemology and ethics of spurious temporality. Journalistic presentation generates a temporality of equivalent instantaneity.” Exhibit B (particularly interesting because it convey’s Steiner’s notion of simplicity): “The fact is, simply, this: inasmuch as the generation and communicative verbalization of all interpretations and value-judgements are of the order of language, all elucidation and criticism of literature, music and the arts must operate within the undecidability of unbounded sign-systems.” Exhibit C: “No documentation, where each document is a speech-act susceptible of interpretative reconstruction and deconstruction, in respect of what we now take to be the accelerando of time-feelings during and after the French Revolution, will provide us with any reliable causality in regard to the dramatization of pace and dimension in the sonatas or symphonies of Beethoven.”

The reader’s mind takes to this kind of writing not like a duck to water but like water to a duck’s back. That the thought process in these prototypical passages is complicated and convoluted is problem enough; but that the expression, with all its bloodless abstraction and technical jargon, is contorted and impacted on top of that makes it impossible to grab hold of what one reads. So one reads it over and over again, hoping that repetition will make this paragraph or sentence clearer. But the only thing that becomes clear is that no help