Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words by David Whyte (Many Rivers Press, 2015; 247 pages) Maria Popova, a woman that I admire, said about this book that David Whyte -- internationally acclaimed poet and author of seven volumes of poetry and four books of prose -- has created "One of the wisest, most ennobling things I've read in my entire life." And I agree with her. With the imagery of a poet and the reflection of a philosopher, David Whyte turns his attention to 52 ordinary words, each its own particular doorway into the underlying currents of human life. The book starts with the word "Alone" and closes with the word "Work". Each chapter is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to rethink our perspectives in life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability. Besides alone and work, there are chapters on ambition, anger, beauty, beginning, besieged, confession, courage, crisis, denial, despair, destiny, disappointment, forgiveness, friendship, genius, giving, gratitude, ground, haunted, heartbreak, help, hiding, honesty, Istanbul, joy, loneliness, longing, maturity, memory, naming, nostalgia, pain, parallels, pilgrim, procrastination, regret, rest, robustness, Rome, run away, self-knowledge, shadow, shyness, silence, solace, touch, unconditional, unrequited, vulnerability, and withdrawal. This is a rewarding reading for every day of the life of a person. This is what he writes about "Loneliness": is the doorway to unspecified desire. In the bodily pain of aloneness is the first step to understanding how far we are from a real friendship, from a proper work or a long sought love. Loneliness can be a prison, a place from which we look out at a world we cannot inhabit; loneliness can be a bodily ache and a penance, but loneliness fully inhabited also becomes the voice that asks and calls for that great, unknown someone or something else we want to call our own. (...) Absolutely gorgeous reading. The kind of reading you need to sip, and devour slowly, with a deep tempo. Find this title in our catalog: Consolations Recommended by: Maite
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