A Friendship in Twilight
Lockdown Conversations on Death and Life
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
In a time of plague, fundamental questions become immediate and personal. The pandemic, droughts, floods, fire, political violence: the world has been grimly reminded of the proximity and inevitability of death. Jack Miles and Mark C. Taylor—acclaimed public intellectuals and scholars of religion, one a Christian and the other an atheist, close friends for fifty years—have spent their lives grappling with questions of ultimate concern. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, locked down at home and facing an uncertain future, Miles and Taylor embarked on an extended conversation about living and dying in an imperiled world.
A Friendship in Twilight is their plague journal. In raw and searching letters, written daily from the first lockdowns through the Capitol riot, Miles and Taylor reflect on life during overlapping crises. Amid the menace of the pandemic and the unceasing political turmoil, they debate the lessons that a catastrophic present can teach about the future and how to read, think, live, and face up to death. Confronting the vulnerability of their aging bodies and the frailty of American democracy, the two friends discuss why and how philosophical reflection matters for a wounded world. Their conversations are imbued with an ever-present sense of urgency about the worth of a life, the fragility of existence, and the uncertainty of endings. Seamlessly moving from heartfelt emotion to philosophical speculation, current events to great art and literature, this book is a powerful and moving testament to the precarity of life and to enduring friendship.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Longtime friends Miles (Religion as We Know It), a religious studies professor at the University of California, Irvine, and Taylor (Seeing Silence), a religion professor at Columbia University, deliver an uneven collection of correspondence chronicling life during the Covid-19 pandemic. In a series of "lockdown letters" written between March 2020 and Jan. 7, 2021, the authors reflect on aging and the state of the world, charting the uncertainty of the pandemic's early days with quotidian discussions of canceled plans alongside ruminations on mortality: "Death is now our familiar, isn't it? It terrifies us, but not the way it once did." Miles and Taylor also discuss politics, expressing frustration over the Trump administration's response to the pandemic and fears that the president would use it as a pretext to postpone the 2020 election. There are some affecting insights ("We both discovered that our obsession with death is really a preoccupation with life"), but many will question the need to relive the minutiae of a time barely past with predictable takes ("Many of the people who support Trump drive pick-ups with gun racks and listen to country music on the radio") and dry exchanges about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This faithfully captures the experience of living through 2020, for better or for worse.
