Take heart, Reader, old or new: These essays—their premises, arguments, conclusions, triumphs, and shortfalls—are still well...
Returns to print 32 tough-minded discourses, written from 1938 to 1975, from one of American literature’s most exacting cultural critics.
Positioning Trilling (1905–75) for unfamiliar readers, editor Wieseltier (Kaddish, 1998) presents him as “a distinguished enemy of his time.” Repute aside, how fare these writings today? Trilling’s abiding concern: how literary situations embody cultural situations—those moral struggles about personal choice, which in turn determine literary treatment. He prizes how James’s anarchist study The Princess Casamassima does not shirk the price civilization exacts, nor our duty to protest extortion at “the dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet.” Fellow feeling imbues reconsiderations of Huck Finn (as “a friend to man”) and Keats’s “heroic” letters and “The Immortality Ode” (commemorating not the death of inspiration but the birth of adulthood). Reflections on love, not lust, as Lolita’s ruling theme still sizzle. But Santayana proves himself the prig Trilling claims he is not; advocacy for Howells dotes on the critic’s extrapolations; Austen’s mischievous deep-founded skepticism in Mansfield Park outflanks the sober professor. Despite his Partisan Review allegiance, his essays (The Liberal Imagination, 1950; Beyond Culture, 1965; etc.) toe no party line, though few pass unsanctified by Freud or “dialectic.” Others, tied to their times, are grave markers, not eternal flames: Revisiting the Leavis-Snow “Two Cultures” tongue fight is like chewing sawdust. Trilling consistently pits “spontaneity, complexity, and variety” against the propensity to commiserate with, then condescend to, then coerce our peers. Not tragic, never droll, this successful lecturer—instantly understood while sparking further thought—makes the “complex and difficult and exhausting” moral life sound less empowering than burdensome. Does all good literature wag a moral like a tail?
Take heart, Reader, old or new: These essays—their premises, arguments, conclusions, triumphs, and shortfalls—are still well worth grappling with.Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-25794-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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