On Consolation
Finding Solace in Dark Times
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5,0 • 1 valoración
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- 5,99 €
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- 5,99 €
Descripción editorial
As read on BBC Radio 4's 'Book of the Week', a timely, moving and profound exploration of how writers, composers and artists have searched for solace while facing loss, tragedy and crisis, from the historian and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist Michael Ignatieff.
'This erudite and heartfelt survey reminds us that the need for consolation is timeless, as are the inspiring words and examples of those who walked this path before us.' Toronto Star
When we lose someone we love, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes – war, famine, pandemic – we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.
How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of unbelief? In a series of portraits of writers, artists, and musicians searching for consolation – from the books of Job and Psalms to Albert Camus, Anna Akhmatova, and Primo Levi – writer and historian Michael Ignatieff shows how men and women in extremity have looked to each other across time to recover hope and resilience. Recreating the moments when great figures found the courage to confront their fate and the determination to continue unafraid, On Consolation takes those stories into the present, movingly contending that we can revive these traditions of consolation to meet the anguish and uncertainties of the twenty-first century.
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Great minds find meaning in great sorrow in this searching meditation from historian Ignatieff (Fire and Ashes). Old texts, Ignatieff writes, are "still there to help us in our hour of need, to perform their ancient task once again," and he surveys a variety of thinkers' responses to death, bereavement, sickness, political disappointment, and civilizational collapse. These include Job's questioning of a seemingly callous God, Paul's promise that suffering leads to eternal life with Christ, and the stoic acceptance of misfortune by Roman statesmen Cicero and Marcus Aurelius. He also covers the humanist tradition of essayist Michel de Montaigne, philosopher David Hume, and sociologist Max Weber, who eased mortality's sting with a focus on life's daily pleasures, self-actualization, and devotion to one's calling; Holocaust survivor Primo Levi's project of bearing witness to the horror of Auschwitz; and hospice movement founder Cicely Saunders's vision of dying as a valedictory summation of life. Ignatieff's explorations of mainly post-religious discourses of consolation are erudite and elegant, though more impactful are his vivid biographical sketches of his subjects holding themselves together through failures, terminal illness, or looming execution, sometimes with the help of others' kindness. These stories of perseverance inspire and, in their way, console.
