My abiding interest is in how people find meaning in their lives in a post-church, secular world, and what happens when they fail. I have concluded that life needs to be seen as an arc leading to significant end; it needs to be experienced as a coherent story. The vital role of culture here is in providing archetypal stories, usually from a long time ago, but ones constantly retold and brought up to date, which provides background shapes to identify with, armatures as it were. I've explored these challenges in a series of books: Ego and Soul, The Western Dreaming, The Existential Jesus, and soon to appear, The Saviour Syndrome.
Humanism built Western civilization as we know it today. Its achievements include the liberation of the individual, democracy, universal rights, and widespread prosperity and comfort. Its ambassadors are heroes of modern culture—Erasmus, Holbein, Shakespeare, Velazquez, Descartes, Kant, and Freud. Those who sought to contain humanism’s pride within a frame of higher truth—Luther, Calvin, Poussin, Kierkegaard—could barely interrupt its torrential progress.
But humanism failed, in succeeding Christianity, to provide answers to the three great meaning questions facing every individual: Where do I come from, what should I do with my life to give it sense, and what happens at death? It left the modern West stranded in melancholy and discontent, facing an ordeal of unbelief.
Don Quixote, who first appears in public in 1604, imagines himself riding around the world saving damsels in distress, righting wrongs, and punishing criminals, and his imagination is so powerful that it drives his life. I believe, therefore I am! That his beliefs are delusional does not seem to matter.
The only people he actually helps are the leisured aristocracy, who stand as proxy for all who dwell in the modern world. They become fascinated by his adventures—and for the very quality in him that they lack, his capacity for life. To use the terms of Don Quixote’s leading twentieth-century disciple, the great Gatsby, his redeeming quality is an enormous capacity for dreaming.
Nick, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, is perpetually on edge and lost, within and without, until he finally encounters someone who moves. Gatsby, this shadowy Caesar, attracting rumours like a light-bulb attracts moths, is bathed in a magical aura. But reality, which is sordid, soon crushes the beautiful dreams and the dreamer himself.
As the summer unfolds, Nick is drawn into Gatsby's world of luxury cars, speedboats and extravagant parties. But the more he hears about Gatsby - even from what Gatsby himself tells him - the less he seems to believe. Did he really go to Oxford University? Was Gatsby a hero in the war? Did he once kill a man? Nick recalls how he comes to know Gatsby and how he also enters the world of his cousin Daisy and her wealthy husband Tom. Does their money make them any happier? Do the stories all connect? Shall we come to know…
Hamlet is Shakespeare's, the master humanist, key work. It stands on the post-Christian threshold of the modern world, surveying the future, asking what is left to believe in.
Hamlet’s first significant encounter is with death, in the form of the ghost of his murdered father. His most powerful love scene takes place in the graveyard reminiscing tenderly to the skull of Yorick, the Court Jester. His one ‘felicity’, as he calls it, is to die. Hamlet confronts us with the big modern question: "To be or not to be?" However, his monologue on the subject, the most famous speech in the English language, has nothing to do with the nature of being—of self, or of identity. It is a long meditation on suicide.
Hamlet’s encounter with death, which has paralysed him, has also emptied him of any saving fantasies. He illustrates Tolstoy’s later dictum that if death becomes meaningless, then so does life. Hamlet pioneers the base modern condition—unbelief without hope of a saviour.
In Shakespeare's verbally dazzling and eternally enigmatic exploration of conscience, madness and the nature of humanity, a young prince meets his father's ghost in the middle of the night, who accuses his own brother - now married to his widow - of murdering him. The prince devises a scheme to test the truth of the ghost's accusation, feigning wild insanity while plotting revenge. But his actions soon begin to wreak havoc on innocent and guilty alike.
Dostoevsky’s central character is Nicholas Stavrogin, a Russian aristocrat, around Hamlet’s age. He has the aura of the mysterious stranger, arriving from beyond, haunted, solitary, fearless, and living outside all normal social bounds and conventions. He carries direct Christ allusions, stavros meaning ‘cross’ in Greek. Everybody from his own generation is in love with him, male and female. A few years earlier, adoring disciples travelled the world with him. He taught them that if it could be mathematically proved that the truth excludes Christ, he would choose Christ.
But Stavrogin lost his faith, and thereafter plunged into a life of violence and debauchery, seducing a number of women in the town, even, it is rumoured, raping a twelve-year-old girl. Without faith, he is equally without passion. Having lost the one indispensable thing, he kills himself.
The Possessed or The Devils (also translated as Demons) is a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in the journal The Russian Messenger in 1871–2. It is considered one of the four masterworks written by Dostoevsky after his return from Siberian exile, along with Crime and Punishment(1866), The Idiot (1869) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Demons is a social and political satire, a psychological drama, and large scale tragedy. This is "Dostoevsky's most confused and violent novel, and his most satisfactorily 'tragic' work." Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived…
In Henry James’ masterpiece from 1901, Lambert Strether, aged 55, is a Boston Puritan who hasn’t lived. He travels to Paris on an ambassadorial mission.
From the moment of arrival in Paris he is beguiled and intrigued, but unclear what to do. He proceeds to meander through gilded French drawing rooms in which high aesthetic taste of both manner and décor presides. This quiet and modest outsider eventually fills out into the man who runs the show.
Strether has discovered what to know, who to choose, and when to move. Everything depends on it. The method must be learnt in the thick of lived life along the way.
Here is evidence of the existence of a god within, a wisdom of soul with a coherent vision of what matters, one that slyly directs the focus of the person walking confusedly in the world, leading them to move with discrimination.
The original American in Paris. This dark comedy, seen as one of the masterpieces of James's final period, has all the elements of great writing, brilliant plot and gorgeous setting- An Edwardian gentleman from the States arrives in seedy and sophisticated Paris to rescue his wayward future step son. But his innocent American background has not prepared him for such seduction... Beautiful hardback gift edition of this collectable classic.
This complex tale of self-discovery -- considered by the author to be his best work -- traces the path of an aging idealist, Lambert Strether. Arriving in Paris with the intention…
Nietzsche was the master diagnostician of the challenge of living in a secular world, once God was dead. The Birth of Tragedydevelops a powerful theory of culture, its necessity for human wellbeing, and how it works.
The basic assumption is that human life is lived on the surface, driven by a substratum of demonic instincts, nightmare fears, and a barbaric will to lust and sadism. Culture’s task is to transform these unconscious drives into harmonious and beautiful images that capture the mind and give an orderly direction to how humans conduct their lives.
But for culture to have that commanding power it needs to be founded on a fixed and primordial sacred site. Without that, the modern problems rise: nihilism, rancour, and depression.
"The Birth of Tragedy; or, Hellenism and Pessimism" by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (translated by William A. Haussmann). Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie’s aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.
Stefan promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations. Their mutual attraction is stymied when Stefan’s older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood. Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program. Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his…
