Novelist and spiritual self-abuser Shainberg (Memories of Amnesia, 1988, etc.) emits a long, piercing whine on the subject of his experiences with zazen, or sitting meditation. Early on the memoir has a certain stuttering momentum, as Shainberg describes growing up in postwar Memphis and enduring his father's intensive dinner-table monologues about psychoanalysis and Zen. The intrepid father and son traveled across the country to hear lectures by Krishnamurti and Alan Watts long before Eastern spirituality became fashionable in middle America. Shainberg fils was mostly concerned with his performance on the basketball and tennis courts, which suffered from his adolescent attempts to parse Zen paradoxes about desire, effort, and perfection and incorporate this wisdom into his play. The author had less time for sports as he grew older, owing to the consuming demands of his rampant self- absorption. As near as can be gleaned from this memoir, Shainberg has devoted his entire adult life to a failed attempt to understand Zen practice. Except for a few passing references to his writing and some oblique consideration of his marriage as a meditation competition, the author presents himself as having spent the past few decades sitting on a succession of cushions and approaching, but easily escaping, lasting enlightenment. Interspersed throughout are exchanges of dialogue with Shainberg's Zen master Kyudo Roshi, whose gleeful riddles in pidgin English are reproduced fondly but often inscrutably. The memoir's narrative line is how Shainberg's ego, like the occasional bout of flatulence he describes during group zazen, always bobs up and disrupts any spiritual progress he might be making. By the time Shainberg affiliates himself with a spendthrift Zen quack late in the book, readers may wonder whether he's serious about his spiritual quest or whether he just gets off on the company of eccentrics.
Pub Date: Jan. 17, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-44116-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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
BOOK REVIEW
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