This is the work of a writer whose modest intellectual abilities have been scattered to the winds by the most degraded type of postmodernism. In this mongrel book, rootless cosmopolitanism finds its aesthetic correlative in shopworn irony. Among the low points are a flaccid discussion of French New Wave cinema, in which the writer inhales the last fumes of 1968 and strikes postures intended to impress us with his radicalism, and an essay on the figure of the setting sun in Western art that tilts at being a critique of Eurocentrism and the notion of decline, but loses its way in a porridge of half-understood concepts drawn from the great German Romantics. Seen from the cliff top, with the sea wind in your face and the ancient stones close at hand, there is no challenge here, just cowardice and confusion. True wisdom arises out of primordial fear, which is fear of the unknowable essence of things from which all authority derives. The author of this collection of platitudes is neither smart enough to intuit that essence, nor self-aware enough to know how afraid he ought to be.