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Nov 13, 2009 04:04 PM

Saving Isaiah

by Michael Weiss

It takes a certain type of personality to spend a cold Moscow night alone with Anna Akhmatova in a state of total chastity and reserve. Then again, Isaiah Berlin saved all the good dirt for his own scholarly reputation, which, despite the best revisionist efforts, was quite middling and saved from the enormous condescension of posterity only by the rhetorical pyrotechnics and parlor charm of its holder. That extremely talented profile artist, Evan Goldstein, does his best to show the “no, wait!” side of this long-running dispute as to Berlin’s intellectual talents in the Chronicle of Higher Education. A few shrewd insights into Zionism and a handy guide to Russian humanists, perhaps? (In my opinion, his best essay was on Marx and Disraeli, the pole stars of 19th century “exception” Jews.) But apart from a useful apothegm about foxes and hedgehogs, which belonged to the Greek poet Archilochus, and a less useful dichotomy between “negative” and “positive” liberties, which located the happy political middle-ground as being somewhere between Ayn Rand and Stalin, what has Berlin left us except for so many friends, so many letters and so many admirable summaries of what greater men have thought and done?

Goldstein buries his lede slightly by quoting Henry Hardy, the “the editorial impresario” of the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust on what it feels like spending 30 years of your life keeping an affirming flame for an old chum rather than pursuing your own legacy: “I am more comfortable saying, Here is what this person thinks, isnt it interesting?’,” Hardy responded, “rather than saying, Look, this is what I think, isnt it interesting?’”

What’s the opposite of projection? Absorption?