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Said's amateur passion, his violon d'Ingres, is music. He is an accomplished pianist; in April he gave duet recitals in New York and Washington with the Lebanese pianist Diana Takieddine. For some years he wrote music criticism for The Nation, and in 1991 he published a collection of his essays, Musical Elaborations. Today, afflicted by leukemia and acutely aware of the shortness of life, he is thinking of writing "a memoir of my pre-political life, which ended in 1967. What a strange world I grew up in! -- a vanished world now. It's very hard even to find traces of it. I can let memory play all the tricks it wants. I want that, actually. Then maybe I'll write some fiction."
His writing and teaching have always ranged widely. Their base -- laid long ago at Harvard -- is the tradition of German philology, exemplified in America by the emigre scholar Erich Auerbach (1892-1957), that explores the modes and levels of representation in Western writing. "Representation" -- how we see other cultures, how we depict them in our own through imagination and stereotype -- is the core of Said's work, especially of Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. But Said despises what he calls "the minority mentality" on American campuses. "My books are one long protest against it. The status of victim is not a passive blanket that you pull over yourself. You can always do something. Anyway, there's no such thing as a pure unmediated culture, any more than there's a pure unmediated self. All people, all cultures, are hybrid. I'm against essentialism. I'm against provincial nationalism. Yet people still insist on getting it wrong; they make the most absurd constructions on my work. It's not about saying imperialism was bad -- you don't need a book to tell you that." Not the least absurd is the idea that Said's criticism aims to downgrade the classics by unmasking some of their authors' social or political assumptions. "How can you not believe in quality? I can't stand that line, it's so stupid."
Politics -- and the haunting, obsessive questions of Arab identity -- entered Said's life long after music and literature. His effort to put them together started after the 1967 war with the seizure of the West Bank. "Many of my friends who had studied in America began to be drawn back, and I began to be involved in the re-emergence of Palestinian nationalism." He set out to relearn classical Arabic. He got extra encouragement from his wife Mariam Cortas, the daughter of a Lebanese educator. "Mariam also grew up in the Middle East, but in an entirely Arab system."