Roberto Calasso

We all know we’re modern, but how many of us can say why? My guest on 'The Green Room' this week, Italian writer Roberto Calasso, is a peerless explorer of what he calls the modern 'revolution in the human brain’, and of the ghostly endurance of the old gods. His latest book, The Unnamable Present, is the ninth in a kaleidoscopic series which includes retellings of Greek and Indian myths (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka), studies of artists and writers (Tiepolo Pink, K, La Folie Baudelaire), the search for the origins of human society in sacrificial rites (Ardor, on the ancient Vedic civilization), and the tracing of the roots of the modern age in revolutionary politics and Romantic philosophy (The Ruin of Kasch, Literature and the Gods).