The Rudolf Steiner Library Newsletter Fall 2007 Volume #43 HeadinContents 2 What’s Happening in the Library Founding Editor: Fred Paddock By Judith Soleil Editor: Mado Spiegler Copyeditor: Judith Soleil 3 A Word from the Editor Production: Judith Kiely By Mado Spiegler Reviews The library newsletter is a publi- cation of the Rudolf Steiner Li- 4 Anthroposophy and Imagination: brary, the national library of the Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy Anthroposophical Society in gSelected and edited by Kate Farrell. America. It is designed to keep Review by Frederick J. Dennehy library users informed of the con- tents of the library, as well as 7 Dostoevsky: The Scandal of Reason protocols for using it. It also fea- By Maria Nemcová Banerjee. tures translations of articles from Review by John Harris Beck European anthroposophical jour- nals that explore anthroposophy’s 11 Goethe’s Science of Living Form: relationship to the world, thus The Artistic Stages encouraging dialogue and the mutual exchange of ideas. By Nigel Hoffman. Review by Mado Spiegler Subscriptions are $16 for three 12 Rudolf Steiner: issues. An Introduction to His Life and Work Subscribe through: By P lace Garyyou r m essag e h ere. Fo r m axim um i mpact , use two or t hre e se ntenc es. Lachman. Anthroposophical Society in Review by Christopher Bamford America 1923 Geddes Avenue 14 Brave New Mind: A Thoughtful Inquiry Ann Arbor, MI 48104-1797 into the Nature of Mental Life By Peter C. Dodwell. Letters to the editor are welcome. Review by Mado Spiegler Rudolf Steiner Library Feature Article 65 Fern Hill Road Ghent, NY 12075 16 Idols and Confession [email protected] A Review by Rudolf Steiner. Translation by Mado Spiegler 21 Annotations What’s Happening in the Library By Judith Soleil • As the sun shines and the summer greens deepen, we work in the cool of the library’s natural air conditioning (our headquarters is in the basement of a grand old carriage house). Our workplace is blessedly dry, as the drainage installed here this fall to abate flooding in the foyer WORKS! We’ve been sprucing up and improving the building and grounds―painting our funky old outdoor book deposit box; replacing our sad old sign with a handsome new one; pruning foundation plantings. Judith Kiely and volunteer Louise Sierau continue to repair damaged books. The care taken within and without reflects back upon and enriches our work. • With your generous support, we met the library’s appeal goal this fiscal year, making it possi- ble to maintain our high level of service as well as our building and its precious contents. Thank you! • Our first attempt at grant writing last fall (with the invaluable help of Ann Kucera in Ann Ar- bor) was successful: we’ve just learned that the library was selected to receive a grant from New York State for a conservation and preservation assessment! This evaluation will let us know what’s needed to protect the collection in terms of air quality, storage methods, etc. • We have spent much time this spring evaluating library automation products, having given lots of thought as to whether this is a good next (big) step for the library. As we’ve looked at the potential these systems have to help us work more effectively, our affection for the “old ways”―three (3!) hand-signed cards for every book we check out―has gradually given way to glad anticipation of all the indexing, cataloging, and other neglected tasks we could begin to tackle were we to automate circulation. Our patrons would also have greater access to the li- brary’s holdings, and we would have the possibility to post newsletter and other content online. This change would benefit all our patrons, not just those with Internet access, as we would have more time to respond to individual requests. We will be recommending a system to the council of the Anthroposophical Society this fall, and may need to do additional fund- raising to support this undertaking—we’ll keep you posted! • We seek donations of the following: Soil Fertility, by Ehrenfried Pfeiffer; Kunstgeschichte als Abbild innerer geistiger Impulse (GA 292, Bildband); and The Fall of the Spirits of Darkness by Rudolf Steiner. • Many patrons wonder how we’re able to answer so many of their questions. We can’t claim unusually keen intellects or memories (at least I can’t!), but there are resources that aid tre- mendously in our research. The first is the website provided by the Rudolf Steiner Nachlass- verwaltung (http://rsv.arpa.ch/cgi-bin/newuser.cgi), where one can search the full texts of the Gesamtausgabe (Steiner’s collected works) using keywords. The service is only available in German, and while you must register to use the site, registration is free. Joan Almon recently let us know of another great resource: a search for keywords, keyword combinations, titles, and/or authors of non-Steiner anthroposophical works (over 14,000) created by the Anthropo- sophical Society’s library in Stuttgart (www.rudolf-steiner-bibliothek.de). Again, the site is in German, although they do have some books in English, which are also searchable by (English) keyword. For those who don’t read German, don’t despair; one can get surprisingly far with a dictionary! • Look for our annual appeal letter this fall, and please keep in mind the benefits to all when your generosity makes it possible not simply to sustain the library, but to improve it. • We’re very much looking forward to the AGM in October, and hope to meet many of you there. 2 A Word from the Editor By Mado Spiegler I would like to place this introduction to the newsletter under the sign of Nigel Hoff- mann’s intriguing invitation—in his book, Goethe’s Science of Living Form—to learn to perceive the world in the radically different spirit of each of the four elements. In perhaps less radical ways, the other books reviewed in this issue also present us with this challenge. Christopher Bamford’s favorable review of Gary Lachman’s Rudolf Steiner, an Intro- duction to His Life and Work, while noting the author’s selective focus, ends with an invi- tation to anthroposophists not to reject the book on that account, but rather to take seri- ously the gifts of the author’s particular perspective. One key aspect of the years covered by Lachman’s biography is Rudolf Steiner’s friendship with Rosa Mayreder. Steiner’s indefatigable championing of Mayreder’s fiction with publishers and fellow editors reflected their bond as “comrades in arms” in the quest for freedom. As he wrote to her on January 4, 1891: “I have watched my sympathy toward your entire being grow to the same extent that I recognized the thirst for self-affirmation, for the unrestricted unfolding of the human totality. The striving toward a full humanity that doesn’t know class or sex, that refuses to recognize anything that makes us half—or a quarter or an eighth—human, this drive has been for me something so uplifting that I can’t begin to calculate the sum of the joys it has meant for me.” In this issue we bring you an article Steiner wrote in 1899 that reflects on Mayreder’s sharp insight into some of the ways men and women block their own way to love and spiritual freedom. Peter Dodwell’s Brave New Mind, written by an experimental psychologist with a Waldorf background, takes the reader on a tour of experimental psychology in the various incarnations it has taken over the past one hundred and fifty years. This might pose a stretch for many of us who are used to thinking of this field as either uninteresting or sinis- ter; but he allows us to see how the fine grain of the human mind’s reality perpetually slips through the coarse nets in which one attempts to catch it; or alternately how something of its immense reaches forever transcends the boundaries of the unified systems we devise to contain it. John Beck reviews Maria Nemcová Banerjee’s Dostoevsky: The Scandal of Reason, a short and richly provocative book on one of the visionary novelists of modern humanity. We have of course the usual complement of short annotations. Many of the recent ac- quisitions come from the domains of education and of food—what better way to cultivate the many qualities of the world than through the exploration of their tastes, as Indian phi- losophy or Jakob Boehme well knew. Readers might also note Christoph-Andreas Linden- berg’s Twelve Aspects of Michael, Contrasted by Their Counter-Images, and Willi Finken- rath’s beautiful book on the Last Supper by Leonardo: Das Zeugnis des Wortes—Das Abendmahl des Lionardo da Vinci with a commentary in the light of the zodiac. I hope Fred Dennehy won’t mind my borrowing the final sentence of his review of An- throposophy and Imagination—a selection of past articles from the Journal for Anthropo- sophy—to summarize my invitation to all of us: to engage “works of imagination of all kinds―poetic, esoteric, and more…so that, [quoting Kate Farrell] ‘the vast democracy of light Steiner envisioned passes naturally through…roomfuls of mutually opening doors.’” 3 Anthroposophy and Imagination: Classics from the Journal for Anthroposophy Selected and introduced by Kate Farrell Series editor: Robert McDermott No. 76 (Series volume 2), Summer 2006, 127 pgs. Review by Frederick J. Dennehy Very few people are “against” imagination. But there are some readers for whom any fiction, metaphor, invention, semblance, or wide-ranging connotation of any sort is a species of error, a deviation from a truth that is fixed by a set form of perception or held tight inside a text flattened and pinched into one di- mension.