From the New York Times: Half an Oaf.
On the theory that a certified intellectual might be able to enlighten me, I decided to consult someone I know who is an officer of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. There’s no substitute for going right to the top. Here’s what the certified intellectual had to say about the sentence in question: “I suppose it’s meant to imply that culture (whatever that is) has allowed (by encouraging the Romantic ideal) the idea of the self to flourish, indeed triumph, to the extent that we value it more than anything else.” Appreciative of his help, I decided not to trouble him further, although what I wanted to ask him was what I would have wanted to ask the literary critic if he had laid that business about the existence of the self on me while, say, we were waiting together in the subway for a train: “Could you please give me an example?”