A densely packed celebration of the resilience in some questioning souls.
A guidebook explores avid seekers and their vision quests.
“Why does everyone else seem to be content with their answers, while I continue to have questions?”—this and similar queries open up the wide-ranging discussions in Dunion’s (Dare to Grow Up, 2016, etc.) latest book. It deals with the special challenges and fulfillments faced by people he calls “threshold dwellers,” individuals who are “familiar with the gateway from the familiar to the unknown.” These seekers are characterized by their restless search for self-identification and the vision quests they undertake to answer a range of basic questions—What do I want? Where am I going? Who’s coming with me on the way?—that most people spend little or no time pondering. Dunion analyzes the dangers that lurk on such quests and the potential pitfalls seekers face, including the risks of cynicism or self-righteousness. He spends a corresponding amount of time looking at the personal reasons that might create inertia and inhibit the questing that should come naturally to seekers. The ultimate goal of all such questing is to find home, and when Dunion examines the multifaceted nature of that concept, his book is at its strongest. The underlying contradiction—a group of people seeking home but identified by their never quite finding it—is not lost on the author. “The paradox for us seekers,” he writes, “is that we are called to be at home and to pursue a larger vision of home.” Dunion’s writing is fast-paced and invitingly intellectual—literary and philosophical references abound in these pages—and this greatly compensates for the book’s keen supply of fortune-cookie pseudo-profundities (“the willingness to feel vulnerable allows us to be penetrated by love, which can be given and taken away,” etc.). Introverts—part of Dunion’s target audience—will likely be fascinated by his concept of expanded presence, and all readers feeling a vague lack in their lives should find something thought-provoking in the author’s ruminations.
A densely packed celebration of the resilience in some questioning souls.Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4808-3153-7
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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