Soulful and well-written, this will appeal to readers on spiritual paths of their own.
A thoughtful account of religious discovery.
Trauma, physical or emotional, often precipitates spiritual awakening. For Benedek (The Wind Won’t Know Me, 1992) it came in the form of a mysterious episode of near-blindness, followed by visits to doctors who mulled over possible causes—lupus, MS, Lyme disease—for the abnormal MRI readings their tests turned up. Marooned in Texas, where she had followed a boyfriend who turned out not to be the man of her dreams, and working as a television reporter against her writerly instincts, Benedek concluded that the disease was a matter of a troubled heart: “I feel,” she writes, “the cause of my illness was a deep psychic confusion, a rupture from myself. I believe that the cause of this illness was inside myself, in my psyche and in my soul.” Seeking solace, she turned to the wisdom of the Navajo people, among whom she had lived for several years, and to modern psychiatry as interpreted by one Dr. Andresen, whose cagey, idiosyncratic intelligence enlivens the middle section of her memoir. She also began to explore her roots as a Jew, finding a community of Orthodox believers in a Dallas suburb and continuing her studies on her return to Boston. That exploration was by no means easy, she writes, given her views as a feminist against various Orthodox traditions (such as the prayers of thanksgiving recited by men “for not having been born women”). Intellectually torn, she nonetheless reached a reconciliation. “I have come to a newfound respect for tradition, yet I am wary of strictures that impede individual creative strivings, particularly of women.” A subsequent trip to Israel, she writes, deepened her devotion to her faith—and, by good fortune, brought her new love as well.
Soulful and well-written, this will appeal to readers on spiritual paths of their own.Pub Date: April 17, 2001
ISBN: 0-8052-4138-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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