A stirring, lyrical meditation on transfiguration.
The quest for illumination, examined by an English philosopher.
Critchley, who admits to being “temperamentally a mystic,” celebrates the “cultivation of practices which allow you to free yourself of your standard habits…and stand with what is there ecstatically,” a process that has come to be known, sometimes pejoratively, as mysticism. The word itself, he reveals, emerged from the 17th century’s “modern, enlightened worldview” to describe “an existential ecstasy that is outside and more than the conscious self.” This feeling of ecstasy, Critchley asserts, has the potential of liberating us “from misery, from melancholy, from heaviness of soul, from the slough of despond, from mental leadenness.” Although mystics report intense experiences of what they call God, Critchley argues that mysticism can transcend religion to be primarily aesthetic: joy and rapture can be inspired by art, poetry, and, especially for him, music. In his journey into mysticism, Critchley draws on the writings of mystics, including Julian of Norwich, Bernard of Clairvaux, Margery Kempe, Meister Eckhart, and contemporary writers such as Annie Dillard and T.S. Eliot. For Critchley, Dillard’s Holy the Firm and Eliot’s Four Quartets explore “the relation between art and the divine.” Both writers struggle to convey “some dimension of experience that cannot be expressed verbally and is perhaps closer to music.” Critchley is moved by any music that “triggers the energy of religious conversion”: the post-punk band the Teardrop Explodes, for example, and the Krautrock group Neu! “We know that the modern world is a violently disenchanted swirl shaped by the speculative flux of money that presses in on all sides,” Critchley writes. “Yet, when we listen to the music that we love, it is as if the world were reanimated, bursting with sense, and utterly alive.” Erudite and impassioned, Critchley’s intimate examination of mysticism speaks to a yearning for personal transformation and nothing less than enchantment.
A stirring, lyrical meditation on transfiguration.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781681378244
Page Count: 320
Publisher: New York Review Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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