First, however, it might be useful to attend briefly to the literary framing of the opposition in which the “flame”-best translated as the human spirit-is the key term. The lines are so redolent, so indicative of the general problem of discourse in the modern world, that they can be extracted and put to use in other domains of discourse such as philosophy and theology. Stratis Thalassinos, who seems to be a literary stand-in for Seferis himself as he feels the pull in his own literary vocation to be free of the literary conventions of the past, but not in such a way as to be entirely cut off from it. The line-two lines actually-pose the question of memory and forgetting and thus their relation: “What can a flame remember? If it remembers a little less than is necessary, it goes out, if it remembers a little more than is necessary, it goes out.” The poem from which the lines are taken is called “Man,” which in turn belongs to a sequence of poems constellated around the figure of Mr. Not only as a heart and mind, which by definition lie beyond the occasions of their activity, but as a theologian I have been struck by a line in a prose poem by the Greek modernist poet, Georges Seferis.
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