On Consolation
Finding Solace in Dark Times
Timely and profound philosophical meditations on how great figures in history, literature, music, and art searched for solace while facing tragedies and crises, from the internationally renowned historian of ideas and Booker Prize-finalist Michael Ignatieff.
When someone we love dies, when we suffer loss or defeat, when catastrophe strikes--war, famine, pandemic--we go in search of consolation. Once the province of priests and philosophers, the language of consolation has largely vanished from our modern vocabulary, and the places where it was offered, houses of religion, are often empty. Rejecting the solace of ancient religious texts, humanity since the sixteenth century has increasingly placed its faith in science, ideology, and the therapeutic.
How do we console each other and ourselves in an age of…
MICHAEL IGNATIEFF is the author of Isaiah Berlin and The Warrior's Honour, as well as sixteen other acclaimed books, including a memoir, The Russian Album and the Booker finalist Scar Tissue. He writes regularly for the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books, and has appeared on numerous radio and television programs, including Fresh Air and Fareed Zakariah GPS. Former head of Canada's Liberal Party and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard's Kennedy School, he is currently the president of Central European University in Budapest.