In our discussion on Monday irony was rather inadequately explored and the inadequacy left its traces, scars, whatever in my mind. Then in my continued rereading of Claudio Magris’s Danube I came across the following:
‘Here the Danube is young [in the vicinity of Ulm] and Austria is still far off, but clearly the river is already a sinuous master of irony, of that irony which created the greatness of Central European culture, the art of outflanking one’s own barrenness and checkmating one’s own weakness; the sense of the duplicity of things, and at the same time the truth of them, hidden but single. Irony taught respect for the misunderstandings and contradictions of life, the disjunction between the recto and verso of a page that never meet even though they are the selfsame thing between time and eternity, between language and reality . . . Tolerance of the imbalances and deformities of the world . . . ‘ (p. 58).
I am sure you will agree that these words are “right up our street”.
