Love's Work
-
- 9,99 €
-
- 9,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Love’s Work is at once a memoir and a book of philosophy. Written by the English philosopher Gillian Rose as she was dying of cancer, it is a book about both the fallibility and endurance of love, love that becomes real and endures through an ongoing reckoning with its own limitations. Rose looks back on her childhood, the complications of her parents’ divorce and her dyslexia, and her deep and divided feelings about what it means to be Jewish. She tells the stories of several friends also laboring under the sentence of death. From the sometimes conflicting vantage points of her own and her friends’ tales, she seeks to work out (seeks, because the work can never be complete—to be alive means to be incomplete) a distinctive outlook on life, one that will do justice to our yearning both for autonomy and for connection to others. With droll self knowledge (“I am highly qualified in unhappy love affairs,” Rose writes, “My earliest unhappy love affair was with Roy Rogers”) and with unsettling wisdom (“To live, to love, is to be failed”), Rose has written a beautiful, tender, tough, and intricately wrought survival kit packed with necessary but unanswerable questions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a memoir by turns brilliant and exasperating, Rose, who teaches philosophy in England, travels between the adjoining territories of love and death after being diagnosed with-and receiving brutal and ambiguously effective treatment for-abdominal cancer. ``Keep your mind in hell, and despair not,'' she admonishes herself, rejecting both the uncertain certainties of traditional medicine and the sterile idealism of New Age healing. Instead, she puts her shoulder to the wheel of ``love's work,'' getting down in the muck of mortal experience rather than straining futilely to rise above it. Along the way, Rose discusses such worldly subjects as growing up with dyslexia and divorce, finding relief from deadening school lessons in Plato and Pascal and sharing a bed with a Catholic priest. She doesn't wear her extravagant learning lightly (Greek- and German-studded passages and the constant reaching for aphorism may alarm the uninitiated), but her unusual love story rewards the labor it demands. It cuts to the quick.