American intellectuals’ persistent attraction to the idea of a synthetic common culture, pulled together from the best bits of everything everywhere, seems to me like a displaced form of artistic ambition. It is Richard Wagner’s dream of the Gesamtkunstwerk that unites every art into an unanswerable, unignorable synthesis, or the modernist dream of an all-powerful new symbolic language formed from the synthesis of new and old, the reblooding of the past. The intellectual wants to compile and curate this language while the artist wants to invent it. Each wishes for something that cannot be. Precisely because we can use them to talk to each other, common languages can leave us feeling more fragmented; they let us state our differences more clearly. Language consolidates and it splits. We live among fragments and see through various glasses darkly.