A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of historical decline. The fear dominates that Europe's time has passed, that the immortal achievements of European civilization can no longer be repeated, and that we must reconcile ourselves with the thought that Europe will henceforth have a secondary role, or even a supporting role, on a global level. In this lecture, one of the last texts published before his death, George Steiner attempts to "ground" the discussion about the future of Europe - to transfer it from the realm of grand ideas to the ground of lived reality. What defines Europe? Steiner asks. And he answers: the café, this new ancient market that accommodates the intellectual and the politician together with the worker and the homeless person; the dawn-lit and endlessly walked landscape; the constant presence of the past in public spaces, in the streets, in the squares, on the bridges, and the consequent, often suffocating, dominance of memory; the radically contradictory and therefore inexhaustibly fertile primacy of two intellectual traditions, the Greek and the Jewish; finally, the historically unique sense of the finite nature of human endeavors and the recognition of the constitutive tragedy of the human condition.

Is that enough, Steiner wonders, for Europe to remain an idea that stimulates the soul and the imagination? Or is it condemned to "reside in the great museum of past dreams that we call history"? "It is vital for Europe to assert certain eruptions of the soul, which the Americanization of the planet - with all its wealth and generosity - has cast into darkness, certain ideals associated with scholarship, privacy, anarchic individualism, which are almost suffocated within the ostentatious consumption and uniformity of the American model. We, the often tired, divided, disoriented children of Athens and Jerusalem, could return to the belief that the "unexamined life" is indeed not worth living."